LOCALadk Magazine

LOCALadk 28 tion or care. Ronja Redeye leads the group; her voice, the story goes, sounds like wind moving through leaves, and when she speaks, everyone listens. Rosa Sunfinger has filled a wrecked automobile with soil and turned it into a flower garden, planting blooms in the husk of what might once have been considered trash. Ibbi Pip is reaching to the canopy, building birdhouses from scraps of wood — providing habitat, one pallet at a time. Sofus Lotus kneels with her ear pressed to the earth, listening. Kamma Can connects with nature through her creativity, something made clear by her necklace made of large plastic items. The birdhouses are worth pausing on. They appear in many of Dambo's installations, tucked into the canopy surrounding Ibbi Pip. It is a gesture at once practical and symbolic: the sculpture made of discarded wood becomes, itself, a home for living things. Waste, trans- formed, provides habitat. Art that argues for conser- vation does actual conservation work. "Everything I make I try to make out of things laying around," Dambo has explained. "This way I can build really big things with a very small footprint or im- pact." The trolls at The Wild Center were built from locally sourced reclaimed materials — old pallets, scrap lumber, found wood — gathered with the help of volunteers and donors, following the model Dambo has refined at hundreds of sites around the world. The sculptures have a lifespan of roughly ten years, after which they return, as Dambo puts it, to "the earth from whence they came." Even their endings are part of the philosophy. TROLLS: Save the Humans is produced by Imagine Exhibitions in partnership with the artist. Tom Zaller, the company's president and CEO, framed the proj- ect's ambition simply: "We're delighted to collaborate with The Wild Center on this incredible exhibition and to offer a new outdoor exhibition for visitors." The ex- hibition is supported through a Market New York grant from Empire State Development and I Love NY. The Wild Center's Executive Director, Stephanie Rat- cliffe, offered her own framing, one that cuts to the heart of why the pairing of Dambo and this particular place feels so resonant: "These trolls may look playful, but their message is serious — and timely. Through Thomas Dambo's art, we hope visitors of all ages will rediscover their sense of wonder and understand the powerful connection between creativity, sustainabili- ty, and protecting the natural world." Why here, why now The Wild Center opened in 2006, then called the Natural History Museum of the Adirondacks, with a mission to tell the story of this landscape to the people who live near it and visit it. In the twenty years since, it has grown into something more expansive: a platform for the argument that people and the natu- ral world can thrive together, that understanding is a precondition of care, and that wonder is not a luxury but a necessity. Readers of USA Today have voted it the number-one science museum in the country. Wild Walk, which opened in 2015, carries visitors up more than a thousand feet of bridges and platforms into the canopy of a living Adirondack forest, where they can look down at the ecosystem from an eagle's-eye view. The trolls fit naturally into that project. They are made from what would otherwise be landfill, placed in a forest that would otherwise have been a moonscape of logging scars, at a museum that has spent twenty years making the case that this place deserves our attention and our protection. Dambo has articulated the underlying conviction as plainly as anyone: "I think human civilization sits on top of a living natural world. And if we don't under- stand how to protect that, then human civilization doesn't work." The hunt Dambo designs his installations as treasure hunts. The trolls are hidden. Off the beaten path enough that you have to walk, look, pay attention, slow down. You may round a bend and find one suddenly enormous above you. You may catch a glimpse of a wooden foot through a screen of ferns and need to leave the main path to find them. At the Morton Arboretum in Chica- go, where Dambo's 2018 exhibition ran for a season, 1.26 million people visited during the run — the gar- den's two highest-attended years in nearly a century of operation. People came to hunt, and stayed to see the nature. That is the final move in Dambo's philosophy, the one that makes it more than a lecture about recycling. The hunt sends you into the woods. And in the woods, if you are paying even half attention, you begin to notice things — the way light moves through a canopy, the architecture of a root system, the sound a forest makes when the wind picks up. The troll, built of trash, becomes a doorway into something that was never waste at all. This summer, six of them are waiting in the trees in Tupper Lake. Go find them. t TROLLS: Save the Humans is on view at The Wild Center, 45 Museum Drive, Tupper Lake, NY, from June 1 through October 31, 2026. The exhibition is included with general ad- mission. Related programming — including birdhouse-building workshops and recycled material jewelry building — runs throughout the summer season. Visit wildcenter.org/trolls for details.

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