Follies and Caprices at Odd-Kin

This show evokes a formal garden in ruins.  Works include a series of trellis collages with gone-to-seed wisteria, vine covered architectures, broken parquet, reflecting pool and  video of a coming storm where pink ribbons stream through the sky. This body of work started from a rational and organized analysis, but as the world has felt more and more chaotic, I have felt less and less constrained to make sense. Gardens are aesthetic spaces where culture does battle with nature, and order and chaos vie for supremacy. The title of the show refers  both to architectural fancy and human vice. 

Invasive plant species such as wisteria, beach rose, and honeysuckle, came to the United States from East Asia by imperial and colonial routes, to serve a distinctly European vision of the garden. Considering this constrained desire for beauty, and the unintended consequences of its indulgence, I documented invasive ornamental species in gardens, along roadsides and in nurseries. Even using a flash, my black and white photographs looked too innocent- merely pictures of “nature”. I began using a highlighter to indicate the invasive species in each image, a didactic tool on a factual document. As I worked, the highlighter became its own aesthetic intoxicant – the neon colors became riotous, echoing the unchecked growth of the plants. The wisteria sequence of these images form the book Against Nature, and provide the source material for the Trellis collages. For these collages, I extended the gesture of highlighting by physically cutting the plants from their surroundings and affixing them to an architecture of latticework. The floor pieces, meant to help the viewer feel transported, are constructed from peel and stick vinyl tile but hand-cut by the artist and assembled in traditional patterns- Roman for the reflecting pool and one created by Thomas Jefferson for Monticello, after seeing Versailles, and installed by the enslaved joiner John Hemmings. In the video, pink ribbon streaks through the sky to the hysterical laughter of Wagner’s Valkyries. Use of Wagner here, particularly this piece, is a provocation but also a reappropriation of music associated with horrors. This sense of madness is the energetic core of the show