-- A Cyberspace Review Of The Arts

Tending Toward the Untamed: Artists Respond to the Wild Garden, at Glyndor House, Wave Hill in the Bronx, from April 3 to August 19, 2012.

This is a rich and thought provoking exhibition that includes a visit to Wave Hill's Wild Garden, and highlights the work of eight artists who use technology, new media, and traditional representation. Paths through both Gallery and Garden are well worth exploring and then re-visiting as the experience builds on itself.

Inspired by the horticultural aesthetic of late Victorian garden designer, William Robinson (1838-1935), the Wild Garden is envisioned as the kind of landscape one might encounter in nature. However, watching the Wave Hill gardeners at work, it becomes clear that this plot of nature doesn't exist in a pristine state. Flowers and plants from disparate parts of the world have been carefully selected for their hardiness, cosseted, and tamed into a semblance of wildness. They are encouraged to mingle in improbable proximity, bloom in untidy profusion, and settle in random niches to work their poetic enchantment. In the fragrant air, whatever the weather, a ramble through the garden intoxicates the senses. One must return to the gallery to sober up.

Isabella Kirland: Palisades

Beginning with with traditional media, Isabella Kirkland presents the garden in full spring mode. Her attention to botanical detail in "Palisades" 2012, recalls the precision of Dutch still-lives, and late medieval art. Small ink and watercolor studies of various plants and flowers accompany a large oil painting depicting the garden as a utopia on the Hudson where the endangered fauna of New York State live safely among the flora. Kirkland has a scientific background and ambivalence about human intervention is implicit in her idealized image. Noting the palisades in the background, one thinks of the Hudson River School, and the Transcendental movement in the 19th century when the natural world was being blindly consumed for profit even as it was elevated to the divine. The late 20th century brought a growing awareness that the environment was under stress, and by the 21st century the concern that we may have done too much damage already has become firmly established among scientists. Kirkland's work poses the question, "If we left nature alone, could it still restore itself?"

Janelle Lynch: Garden Remains

As a counterpoint to Kirkland's Edenic images, Janelle Lynch's somber, sharply focused inkjet prints remind us that we should never lose sight of nature's imperatives lest we forget what we are. Finding poetry in the natural disorder of the compost heap, her photographs of fallen stalks and moldering leaves, "Garden Remains" 2012, limn the graphics of dynamic decay. In A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard wrote, "The new is always present with the old, however hidden." Like Dillard, Lynch respects the utter seriousness of the natural cycle — grim but for the fact that this year's detritus nurtures next year's growth.

Julie Evans: Wild Garden

In contrast to the works of Lynch and Kirkland, "Wild Garden" 2011, Julie Evans' wall installation, is an internalized garden. Evans masters the chaotic in her control and abandon, exploiting the natural properties of water-based media as it blooms and flows on Mylar. Lifting and collaging the result, she builds semblances of botanical forms into images of wild, efflorescent beauty.

Anat Shiftan: Garden Views Series 2012

Anat Shiftan's "Garden Views" 2012, a series of cool, modern vessels, are Zen-like in their detachment from the turmoil of growth and decay. Her porcelain cylinders are painted with botanically correct interpretations of the garden's plants as they cycle through the seasons. A number of her pieces are displayed throughout the exhibition. Only one, in the last room, is asymmetrical--a thread, perhaps, connecting the rustic nature of the wild garden to the traditional Japanese Wabi-Sabi movement where simplicity, transience and imperfection are necessary components of aesthetic appreciation.

Erik Sanner's two videos in the next room could stand as metaphors for light and its relationship to art and photosynthesis--there is no garden, no photographic image and no painting possible without illumination. In order to capture different perspectives of the garden and document the seasonal changes, Sanner uses film gathered from timed hunting cameras he had mounted around the perimeter.

Erik Sanner: The Pixilated Garden (detail)

For "The Pixilated Garden" 2012, the low-resolution film is projected onto a grid, with a result that suggests light filtering through leaves or scintillating on water. Nature, always a participant at Glyndor Gallery, resonates with this work situated on the west-facing wall. The Hudson River views through the windows on either side create a thoughtful correspondence between the digital and the real.

Sanner's second installation, "The Painted Garden" 2012, shows a video of the artist's hands painting the garden. This video is superimposed on the painted panels and its flickering action makes the painting's tactile surface scintillate like its companion piece. It's a work of modern impressionism that pulls in strands of Monet and his garden at Giverny: the action of light on pigment and the creation of form with light affirming illumination as the essence of both photography and painting

Gary Carsley: Wave Hill Tree Struck by Lightning

In an interesting curatorial loop, Gary Carsley's hyperreal installation, "D.100, Wave Hill Tree Struck by Lightening" 2012, references Kirkland's photorealistic vision of the wild garden. Where Kirkland imagines a restoration of the natural world, Carsley's idea of the garden demonstrates ambivalence toward the possibility. Carsley uses artificial marquetry--faux wood-grain finishes and Photoshop--to create an intricately worked portrait of the garden for the interior of a mass-produced cabinet. Yet, the central figure in his glorious photographic compilation is a lightening-blasted tree. This is an "IKEA" studiolo, a renaissance memory closet complete with chairs and a stool — where a modern humanist can repair to consider the philosophical implications of taming nature within and without. It could also be the simulacrum of a medieval enclosed garden, a domesticated ritual space with an unspoken invitation to enter, meditate on the subjugation of nature, and receive wisdom. Not only are connections made to the idea of beauty purposed with utility as championed by William Robinson and the British Arts and Craft movement, but to medieval and renaissance contemplative traditions, and to the science fiction of Philip K. Dick, where the only real interaction with the natural is virtual.

Chris Doyle: Interleaves

The title of Chris Doyle's two-screen custom display, "Interleaves" 2012, suggests an open book, but he also puts a new spin on the familiar. Doyle examines the structure of the garden through a series of photographs and drawings that he later reworked and animated. In a mesmerizing loop of visual information, Doyle's digitally manipulated images merge, contort, change and return to their original state. His intent, to bring our attention to the way human anxieties and collective attitudes are projected on to the environment, is curiously at odds with the pleasurable viewing experience. His illumined piece suggests a futuristic breviary — offering pleas to care for the environment or prayers for a remembered Nature.

Rebecca Morales: Seral

Finally, Rebecca Morales draws us back into the imagined garden with "Seral" 2012. At once medieval and modern, she paints on vellum, the traditional material of illuminated manuscripts. Creating a tightly packed image, Morales depicts lichen, mosses, and other humble but necessary plants, interwoven with images of manufactured fabrics, knitted yarn, embroidery and lace. Then she documents her work, brilliantly deconstructing the dense layers of information in an accompanying video. Leavened with light and air, the original is released from materiality. The result becomes an art form in itself, and a revelation of the artist's process as she grows the work.

The exhibition could be seen, among other things, as a path through an interior landscape where the artists mirror the gardener's process of selection, idealizing and featuring or removing elements in their interpretive responses to the wild garden. There are metaphorical leaps in the curatorial choices and conceptual links to other artistic and horticultural conventions. The exhibition confronts concerns about the ethics of human intervention and raises questions about what it means to tame nature in the 21st century. In the end, the artists' have recorded their perceptions of nature and refashioned them into evocative images, alerting us to issues that we need to take in and address collectively.

 Catalog of the Exhibition

Donna Maria deCreeft, 2012