Co-created with Kendall deBoer
Artists: Anahita Bagheri, Miguel Caba, Madison Donnelly, Sasha Fishman, Stephanie Guerrero, Lynne Harlow, Lydia Kern, Gracelee Lawrence, Heather Leigh McPherson, Laura Camila Medina, Haejin Park, Tatiana Sky, Brian Smith
Location: OVERLAP Gallery (Newport, Rhode Island)
Dates: August 7–September 15, 2024
Few concepts push the limits of nature-versus-artifice so much as the garden. A lush park teeming with flowers, a manicured lawn behind a white picket-fence, an aristocratic expanse of symmetrically shaped bushes, a shared plot for community-grown vegetables—all these sites, and more, are zones of encounter, designated and marked as special. These zones, too, play with fantasy and reality, as garden legends and mythologies appear from the ancient world through today. Think the Garden of Eden, the Garden of Hesperides, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, or more recent fables like The Secret Garden.
Joining theatrical artifice with earth realities, gardens are places where we tend not only to growing plants, but to ornamentation, to surroundings, to sensory experience, to desire. Frequently an exercise in fantasy-construction, or building other worlds, we cultivate an affect-laden environment in collaboration with atmospheric conditions, attuned to the rhythm of everyday enchantment. The cherubic lawn ornament, the plastic pink flamingo, the concrete saint, the incandescent blow mold, the terra cotta bird bath—all intermingle with vines, weeds, blossoms, soil, insects, rainwater, rodents, fungus, detritus, and petals, stretching and blurring the boundaries of where nature ends and artifice begins. Present entities form an interconnected network, a dense relational web facilitated through and connected by the magic of the garden.
The artists grouped in this exhibition share an interest in toying with materiality and form to expand our understanding of organic and inorganic, especially in relation to constructed, emotive, theatrical spaces. Each sculpture, installation, and wall-hanging performs nature, heightened, magnified, and strange. Through shimmering surfaces, biomorphic shapes, vibrant and efflorescent colors, and suggestive flicker, these artists present us with work with the allure of a superbloom, structured, organized, and gardenized. Bringing these works together in this gallery space—a sacred enclosure, a lovingly arranged stage, an altar—we invite visitors to experience the intimacy, affectation, and enchantment of garden magic.
Vlog
Logo design by Haejin Park
Exhibition photography by Kenzy Cannon
