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View ProfilesPublished February 21, 2024 at 10:00 a.m.
Visitors might expect an exhibit titled "In the Garden" to be a visual harbinger of spring, filled with lush flora. The works on view at the Current in Stowe do feature flowers, greenery and garden-attendant creatures. But the show's seven artists employ nature more as metaphor — "setting the stage for connection and cultivation," as gallery text puts it. Noting that a walled garden is "a place for calm and reflection," the gallery itself is something of a container — perhaps an incubator — for complex ideas about identity, inclusion and exclusion, survival and mortality.
A swarm of moths and butterflies greets gallerygoers at the door. But not to worry: They are cut from black paper and cling to the walls. The installation, titled "Black Cloud," is the work of Mexican artist Carlos Amorales and is inspired by the epic annual migration of monarch butterflies from Canada to Mexico. In fact, Amorales has constructed his delicate pieces in the shapes of 30 different species. A second swarm inhabits a corner of the adjacent gallery space, seemingly poised for takeoff. (At the Current, both iterations were installed by executive director and director of exhibitions Rachel Moore.)
A multidisciplinary artist who has studied and exhibited internationally, Amorales frequently centers his work on language, communication and translation. In the case of "Black Cloud," his winged insects seem like semaphores for the cycle of life and for transformation. Wall text proffers a more personal association, noting that Amorales relates the image of a butterfly migration to "saying goodbye to his grandmother."
If insect-dotted walls are initially startling, Ebony G. Patterson's enormous installation sparks astonishment. Evocatively titled "...there is a rumble as the garden folds, rolls, shreds, devours...itself," it is a sculptural collage within a 96-by-109-by-15-inch wall-hung white box. The front-facing side is glass. Because of the dimensions and weight of the piece, a visitor's first question is likely to be: How did you get this in here? (A crane was involved; doors were removed.)
The assemblage in the box is a jumble of tropical flora and fauna that are presumably native to the Jamaican artist's homeland. The pieces are cut from digital prints on watercolor paper of the artist's own photographs; other shapes are made of construction paper. Plastic bugs perch on plants. Blue butterflies seem to flutter everywhere. Faces and hands appear in unexpected places. There is a lot to discover in this piece.
The standing female figure at its center is impossible to miss. Wearing a red vinyl mini skirt, cropped red top and thigh-high gold lamé boots, she is turned away from the viewer, arms raised high as if in celebration. Floral-patterned paper replaces her head and midriff. Patterson's multidimensional collage is extraordinary, yet the décollage is striking, too: Carefully torn bits of paper over the woman's image suggest a taking-away, a lessening, even amid the natural bounty.
This piece was included in a Breonna Taylor exhibition at the Speed Art Museum in Kentucky, though it does not specifically refer to the 26-year-old Black woman whom police fatally shot in her home in 2020. Wall text suggests that Patterson's work extends an invitation "to grapple with uneasy questions beneath the layers and beyond the patterns."
Four mixed-media works by Paul Anthony Smith also seem freighted with meaning, but both his imagery and titles point the way to interpretation. Employing painting and picotage over inkjet prints, Smith's "Dreams Deferred" series depicts lush greenery and glimpses of urban architecture as seen through a chain-link fence. The Jamaican-born, New York City-based artist manifests issues of identity, diaspora, the meaning of home and barriers to belonging.
Smith's 40-by-50-inch "Dreams Deferred #35" places the viewer in close range of blurred chain links, through which a secondary fence is visible. Both enclose a garden space that beckons but is inaccessible. Incarceration comes to mind; so does the cultural exclusion of immigrants. Wall text explains that Smith considers the painted photographs "a metaphor for the elusive American dream."
The two Vermont artists in the exhibition, Wylie Garcia and Cameron Davis, are represented by one painting each. For several years, Garcia has been filling canvases with flowers — specifically, abstracted blossoms that are untethered to earth. In multiple hues, some nearly phosphorescent, blossoms jostle together in the foreground, while more muted, ghostlier versions appear at the back. Garcia creates a sense of visual depth, as if these flowers might go on forever.
More recently, she has introduced a portal-like space in her paintings, inspired by "the vantage point of the viewer from Thomas Moran's [1895] painting 'The Lotus Eaters.'" In the poetically named "Through a Space in the Garden Bough, I See Light Over the Horizon," the viewer can indeed see a distant landscape, with no clues to what it portends. "Garcia's use of floral imagery relates to a wild untending of pleasurable pursuits at the expense of uncertainty," the text reads. "They are symbols for shifting ideas about identity, place keeping and cycles of life/death."
Davis' 48-by-36-inch acrylic painting "Encounter II, from the Poetic Ecologies Series" is a deep dive into the meaning of nature itself. In fact, it shares qualities of an underwater scene: murky background, a tangle of vegetation, a diaphanous white magnolia blossom illuminated from above. Davis utilizes multiple mark-making techniques — tracing projections, drawing, embossed impressions of actual plants — in the creation of her intensely felt canvases. Hers is both a technical and spiritual interrogation of "the subjective nature of Nature."
Mary Mattingly's gardens are underwater. Her four giclée prints depict the photographed collages of floral landscapes that she made in a fish tank, cutting and pasting images together "to imagine plant evolution in the riparian zone," the text reads. Her plant life is vivid against an inky background. Known primarily as an installation artist whose large-scale works are rooted in climate activism, New York City-based Mattingly chose the smaller, contained milieu of a fish tank to represent the "power of water, time and the life force of the riparian edge." Her work aims to inspire in humans a caretaking relationship with nature.
"In the Garden" presents 10 works in watercolor and graphite by Valerie Hammond, who lives in Coxsackie, N.Y. Flowers make an appearance in most of them. Hands are a recurring motif, as well. Human and botanical imagery merge in several pieces, suggesting transformative — perhaps aspirational — relationships with the natural world. The artist writes that she is interested in transitions from one state of being to another.
The 60-by-39-inch "Harpy," rendered in red pigment on dowel-hung silk, depicts a bird body with a human female head. In Hammond's poignant version of the mythological creature, the woman is pensive and looking downward, perhaps contemplating her fantastical merger.
The artist seems to consider dissolution altogether in a pair of exceedingly pale watercolors on paper. In "Realms 2 (Red and Blue Flowers)," penciled-in butterflies are scarcely visible. In "Realms 1 (Bat)," the titular animal hangs upside down from a plant ever-so-faintly outlined in blue. The bat's eyes, however, are rather unsettlingly focused. Hammond eloquently straddles, as wall text suggests, "the indefinable boundary between presence and absence, material and immaterial, consciousness and the unconscious."
"In the Garden," on view through April 11 at the Current in Stowe. A related talk, "Currently Speaking: Biophilic Design," is Thursday, February 22, 5 to 7 p.m. thecurrentnow.org
The original print version of this article was headlined "Natural Selections | At the Current, "In the Garden" turns over the fertile soil of artistic imagination"
Tags: Art Review, In the Garden, Carlos Amorales, Ebony G. Patterson, Paul Anthony Smith, Wylie Garcia, Cameron Davis, Mary Mattingly, Valerie Hammond, The Current
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