Inside the Growing Trend of Plants in Contemporary Art https://ift.tt/sZv49eK

At the New York Botanical Garden (NYBG), life-size sculptures of jet-black vultures by artist Ebony G. Patterson sparkle subtly in the sunlight as viewers meander their terrain. These birds huddle around pools of blood-red plants—begonias, caladium, hypoestes, and impatiens—that appear like bruises on an otherwise pastel-colored landscape surrounding the 1902 Haupt Conservatory. Inside the historic greenhouse, more vultures have ventured, joining a molting, all-white peacock, while a zigzagging pathway is lined with frosted cast-glass sculptures of extinct plants the artist found in the garden’s archive.

Known for her collage-like works and intricate tapestries, Patterson, who is based in Chicago and Kingston, Jamaica, has been using realistic depictions of plants in her art practice for over a decade. And yet this show, “…things come to thrive…in the shedding…in the molting…,” marks the first time that she has worked with living material in her work. “Ebony’s work is seeded with images of plants, images that we can recognize. But it’s also really about that tension between our desire to control things and our inability to control things,” said curator Joanna Groarke, vice president for exhibitions and programming at the NYBG. The show is a new venture for its host institution as well: Patterson is its first artist resident to work directly with its plant collections for an installation.

While artists have historically sought inspiration from nature for still lifes, vanitas, and landscapes, contemporary creatives are working directly with this source material to harness its new connotations. When the pandemic began, the popularity of houseplants took a parametric upswing. So, too, did artists’ figurations of flowers. Meanwhile, the effects of climate change materialized in the form of wildfires and more frequent natural disasters. Environmental artists staged elemental installations urging change and offering visions for alternative energy solutions; activists threw red paint at museum masterworks. As living beings, plants can be interpreted as extensions of our environment or of ourselves. In an uncertain environment, living material—or its likeness—has proven a useful medium with powerful resonances.

At Halsey McKay Gallery’s booth at NADA New York this past spring, Brooklyn-based artist David Kennedy Cutler presented a recent evolution in his practice: layered canvases bursting with popular houseplants that aren’t real, but certainly look it. In 2013, Cutler began using such depictions of plants alongside his and his wife’s bodies, their clothes, food, and studio or home tools as “surrogate humanity” in works that “talk about introversion and proximity of digital culture and what it was doing to us,” he explained.

Woodland, 2022
David Kennedy Cutler
Halsey McKay Gallery

Ensemble (Study), 2023
David Kennedy Cutler
Halsey McKay Gallery

Cutler’s newest pieces focus particularly on the potted plant, a metaphor for the way we try to contain nature and present only the best version of it, and ourselves. “The stuff that’s around us every day can really describe how we live,” he said. “The first vegetable I started using was kale because I thought it was really symbolic of something that was happening in culture.” It’s the duality of plants that appeals to the artist, whose greens are actually photographs of the real thing printed on acetate.

Rashid Johnson’s recent mixed-media installation series also draws on houseplants’ connection to domesticity. In Antoine’s Organ (2016), currently on view at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum’s group show “Presence of Plants in Contemporary Art,” a black steel grid is brimming with 285 container plants that hide a piano at its center. Curators Pieranna Cavalchini and Charles Waldheim chose to stage the eight-artist exhibition that opened this month in Boston, because of the sheer breadth of contemporary artists using ephemeral, living material.

“Plants are loaded, but also deeply personal,” explained Waldheim, who is also a professor of landscape architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. “Unlike other media of cultural production, we absorb them into our bodies, and that allows them different frequencies of meaning for us.”

Other artists in the show use nature to address the climate crisis. On the museum’s façade, Australian engineer and activist Natalie Jeremijenko has installed the site-specific The Declaration of Interdependence (2023), a living sculpture of flowering nasturtiums over text that recasts organisms’ fight for survival as instead a mutually beneficial effort that helps many more species. Embracing this scientific revelation, the work argues, will allow real progress in the environmental and sociopolitical threats we face today.

Swedish artist Henrik Håkansson also explores the the impact of humans on our environment with the 2021 wall-based work A Painting of a Tree (Ailanthus altissima), for which he inserted leafy cuttings of tree of heaven, a native Chinese plant that is considered invasive in Massachusetts, in plastic bottles attached to canvas. The poetic piece urges viewers to question what the term “invasive” really means—whether nature, or litter, is the greater problem.

The rise in plants as artworks has opened greater opportunity for these conversations, with the medium as a familiar equalizer. Outside of art spaces, landscapes offer even more public reach to explore the same social issues. “Historically, gardens have been defined by their boundaries,” said Viviane Stappmanns, co-curator of the current Vitra Design Museum exhibition in Germany, “Garden Futures: Designing with Nature,” featuring works by artists including Derek Jarman and Zheng Guogu that investigate gardens as testing grounds for issues of sustainability, social justice, and equity. “For many gardeners, activists, and social entrepreneurs, the future—and in some cases, the present—lies in creating interconnected human and natural environments organized in ecosocial networks.”

Patterson’s work, too, evokes the idea of an interconnected human and natural environment, drawing on the political and historical resonances in plants, especially as an analog to enslaved Black bodies. “So many of these plants that we love in our houses came on the same ships that bodies came over on in the great age of discovery,” said the artist.

In the stately library on the NYBG’s 250-acre campus, Patterson’s 2023 work …fester… displays this sentiment around exploitation clearly. One side of the installation is an embellished tapestry of floral wallpapers and gold-leaf skeletal parts; the other is a slump of more than 1,000 red lace–gloved hands, embedded with black cast-glass thistles. Underneath the beauty of cultivated gardens is a more nuanced conversation about origins and labor. “So much of the language used in conversations around the way we think about gardens in terms of the socioeconomic hierarchies we’ve inherited could be equated to the way we think about people,” she continued.

Plants, after all, are inherently political. Like the root systems that feed them, there is always something more underneath the surface.

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10 Contemporary Artists Painting Dreamlike Fantastical Landscapes https://ift.tt/QgDN5vA

whiled sway dozy, 2023
John McAllister
Wentrup

4 trees in Wales, 2021
Daisy Dodd-Noble
Unit London

Representing a three-dimensional landscape on a two-dimensional surface like canvas is always a give-and-take between the real and imaginary. But landscape painters who step into fantastical terrain have all the more choices to make when it comes to achieving that balance. A more experimental approach to their subject matter allows painters to showcase their formal abilities, as well as an unexpected, surprising worldview.

By stretching reality’s colors and forms, these artists allow us to navigate imagined spaces that both beckon and resist human contact, while also suggesting a radical reengagement with our own environment. Such work acquires special resonance today, as the landscape itself becomes increasingly mercurial—whether by smoke pollution from wildfires unleashing alien, orange skies in the U.S., or carbon emissions driving a feedback loop of extreme weather worldwide. In the case of these contemporary painters, however, the drastic changes to the environment are confined to the canvas.

Camilla Engström

B. 1989, Örebro, Sweden. Lives and works in Los Angeles.

The Sun and the Moon, 2021
Camilla Engström
Artsy Auctions

Internal Sunrise, 2020
Camilla Engström
Over the Influence

L.A.-based artist Camilla Engström’s curvaceous, cartoon-colored landscapes appear to live and breathe. Her warm-hued scenes feel intense yet hospitable, at times occupied by anthropomorphized mountains, or presided over by the goddess-like figure Husa, whom Engström conceived of while developing her fantastical style.

Engström studied fashion at New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology, where technical drawing evolved into more free-flowing imagemaking that renegotiates the lines between real and imagined. “I think [they] started to blur when I began drawing for myself, and drawing more images of Husa,” said Engström. “From there I allowed myself to be much more explorative and meld her with landscapes in my mind.”

Yellow Moon , 2022
Camilla Engström
Mustard Contemporary

An inversion of the name’s meaning (“housemaid” in Swedish), Husa signifies spatial and spiritual transcendence—the kind that Engström, who grew up between Sweden and China, longed for as a child. “I think the long stints in China shaped me,” she said. “There was always a feeling of not belonging, no matter where I was, and that made me curious to explore places that maybe I would feel at home in,” she said.

Now based on L.A.’s east side, Engström is cultivating her “forever home.” “Frogtown Cottage is my soon-to-be first home and home studio,” she told Artsy. “It’s named after the neighborhood, a stretch of land running parallel to the L.A. River—there has been a big effort to bring the river into a more natural state, and it is so exciting to see all the birds that are happily living there.”

Daisy Dodd-Noble

B. 1989, London. Lives and works in London.

Daisy Dodd-Noble made the leap from political art to landscapes while studying at the New York Academy of Art under Inka Essenhigh, the figurative painter known for her imaginative scenes. Overwhelmed at the time by the freneticism of Manhattan, Dodd-Noble found that sketching the city’s trees had a stabilizing effect on her. Eventually she began transposing them onto made-up environments, building saturated skies and population-zero expanses around idealized versions of actual trees she had encountered.

Now based in London, she has since trained her vision on trees from her native U.K., Costa Rica, and the south of France, where she recently completed a residency with Bloom Galerie. As much as Dodd-Noble’s vibrant reproductions conjure a pre-Anthropocene innocence, she sees them just as much as expressions of self-knowledge. “I am definitely not attempting to build a new ‘world,’” she said. “I am endeavoring to deepen my own perception of the world around me…then to visually communicate my understanding of the nature of reality and the relationship between us and the world around us.”

Madeleine Bialke

B. 1991, Elmira, New York. Lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Lighthouse, 2023
Madeleine Bialke
Huxley-Parlour

Widow, 2021
Madeleine Bialke
Taymour Grahne Projects

Pine trees predominate the landscapes of Madeleine Bialke, a native of Elmira, New York, now based in Brooklyn. But just as present is the feeling of unease in the trees’ surroundings. Whether it’s an off-color sky or an all-too-placid lake, there’s always something in Bialke’s otherwise idealized scenes that seems to augur an unseen but life-altering force, casting the trees as stand-ins for humanity, and the viewer.

Bialke became fascinated by nature and the secrets it might hold on trips to her family’s Adirondack cabin; it was there that she picked up a copy of Theodore Dreiser’s novel An American Tragedy, which turned out to be based on a crime that occurred on the next lake over—the drowning of Grace Brown by Chester Gillette. “The cultural or historical context of a place is important to me when making paintings.…You look at a place through different-colored glasses when you know [about] its past,” she said.

Amy Lincoln

B. 1981, Bloomington, Indiana. Lives and works in Queens, New York.

Blue and Orange Seascape, 2021
Amy Lincoln
ART FOR CHANGE

Moon & Stars with Blue & Green Rays, 2021
Amy Lincoln
Sperone Westwater

Amy Lincoln’s awe-inducing attention to color and gradient has made her a contemporary leader in both art and design. Each of her prismatic paintings unfolds from a similar, seemingly simple starting point: three colors, plus white. The end goal, however, is encyclopedic: “Limit[ing] myself to three colors…allows me to create a color system within the painting by making sure to show every possible combination of the colors,” Lincoln said.

As Lincoln’s subject matter has moved from the specific to the general, with her more recent seascapes seeming to blur the lines between solid mass and celestial light to infinitesimal degrees, the artist’s star has risen. For instance, her second show at Sperone Westwater this spring coincided with a line of cashmere blankets for the Italian fashion brand Etro. Her inspirational purview, however, remains much the same. “I can mine that little bit of observation for months or years afterwards,” she said. “I’m still repainting plants from paintings I made 10 years ago.”

John McAllister

B. 1973, Slidell, Louisiana. Lives and works in Florence, Massachusetts.

havens hued halt, 2022
John McAllister
Almine Rech

Living and working in central Massachusetts, John McAllister spends 20 hours a week riding his bike in the great outdoors. Nevertheless, this close proximity to nature doesn’t directly shape the elysian scenes he creates. “I spend a lot of time [outdoors] but never think about how it will become a painting because I know that it will be filed away in the subconscious for spontaneous use,” he said. “Imagined elements weigh much heavier in the conscious part of my mind.”

Those intangible elements—varying intensities of oranges, reds, and purples—are what define McAllister’s unmistakable palette and style, while he sees subject matter as secondary. “Foliage, land, and water are there as a structure for light and color to perform upon,” he said. As in the playful linguistic meter he frequently uses in titling works (like serenest surrounds abounds, 2022) and shows (“riot rose summery,” 2016; or “some rhapsodies radiant,” 2021), the compositions are a framework in which to achieve maximum jubilation.

Se Jong Cho

B. 1978, Seoul. Lives and works in Baltimore.

January 2020, 2021
Se Jong Cho
Catalyst Contemporary

Coal Terminal, 2018
Se Jong Cho
Catalyst Contemporary

As an environmental scientist, Se Jong Cho studies both Earth’s underlying processes and mankind’s role in disturbing them. She first turned to painting as a discipline about 10 years ago, while analyzing water pollution in the Mississippi River for her PhD. Painting wasn’t a way to gain distance from peoples’ impact on places, but rather to elaborate on its complexity. “I felt that to tell the stories about humans’ extractive use of Earth’s natural resources and consequent environmental degradation, scientific language alone does not suffice,” she explained.

Cho’s landscapes are visually escapist, depicting a protean universe of self-styled, cosmic forms, which nonetheless draw on artistic and scientific precedents. For example, in a series about resource extraction, Cho created a flattened topography modeled after the same aerial and satellite imagery she uses when examining Earth’s surface for scientific research. Joining a more radical feminist tradition for a series called “Blood Clock,” Cho visualized her own menstrual blood floating over a game board, set against a pastiche of Georgia O’Keeffe’s “Lake George” series.

Amanda Baldwin

B. 1984, Seattle. Lives and works in Queens, New York.

Flooded Neptune, 2022
Amanda Baldwin
Jason Haam

Crimson Canyon, 2022
Amanda Baldwin
Jason Haam

With her stylized still lifes, Amanda Baldwin has built a devoted fanbase. But, in contrast to her earlier still-life paintings, her geometric landscapes eschew horizon lines and other realistic signifiers in favor of multidimensional depth. Through visual layering and an adroit use of color and shadow, Baldwin invites a pleasurable dislocation, suspending the viewer between mundane and abstract.

Ironically, these quasi-naturalistic forms find a concrete reference point in the artist’s childhood interest in math: “I was really interested in mathematical equations, especially algebra, and found it fascinating how math can be found everywhere in nature, from the curve of a seashell and spiderweb, to mineral formations and sand dunes,” said Baldwin. “The patterning found in my work is a reference to that mathematical curiosity.” Unlike in math, perhaps, the product of Baldwin’s careful distribution of color and texture always feels greater than the sum of its parts.

Anna Ortiz

B. 1979, Worcester, Massachusetts. Lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Besando Coyolxauhqui, 2023
Anna Ortiz
Huxley-Parlour

Anna Ortiz finds fantasy and pathos in her contemplative desert scenes, which often serve as imaginary portraits of Mesoamerican figures and archetypes. Born to a Mexican immigrant father in Worcester, Massachusetts, Ortiz draws on Aztec and Mayan mythology in order to lend age-old symbols a personal and down-to-earth resonance.

In Cascabel (2022), for example, the main statue figure sits in a numinous clearing bearing a patchwork of allusions; its tail derives from the serpentine god Quetzalcoatl, while his skull-shaped headdress is that of god of death, Mictlantecuhtli. Despite its heraldic accoutrement, though, the four-eyed figure is weakened and fallible. “I feel it’s important that the statues I’m building appear weathered and irregular, that they embody a history as well as a certain vulnerability,” Ortiz said.

Likewise, Ortiz’s plants and cacti have a last-man-standing quality. Isolated yet animated against the desert scrub, her botanical subjects evoke both longing and endurance. “I like to think of the plants as stand-ins for figures—creatures that can feel alone even when together in the desert,” Ortiz said. “That vulnerability lends itself to considering issues of resilience and compassion.”

Erica Mao

B. 1994, Baltimore. Lives and works in Queens, New York.

River of Flames, 2022
Erica Mao
Anat Ebgi

Given the subject matter of Erica Mao’s paintings—enigmatic scenes of a pre- or post-civilized world—it’s fitting that her practice would also include an ancient art like ceramics. In both mediums, Mao harks back (or projects forward) to a power struggle between humans and their environment that is always unfolding. In her bright paintings, humanoid figures—which Mao calls her protagonists—often appear like outcasts, en route, crossing over untamed land and sea toward an unknown destination.

Though she takes liberties with their surroundings, depicting the terrain rising up and lashing out, she also intends the viewer to find traces of themselves within her works. “Sometimes it feels like I am creating a set for a play or movie, framing the right shot to follow the narrative storyline between the characters,” she said. Despite that vivid worldbuilding, there isn’t necessarily a moral at the end of the story. “My practice is like wandering in a cave with a flashlight,” she said. “As I point the beam of light to different spots I gain another piece to the puzzle.”

Dylan Vandenhoeck

B. 1990, New York. Lives and works in Dobbs Ferry, New York.

Plein Air Painter with Entoptic Phenomena by the Yonkers Whole Foods, 2022
Dylan Vandenhoeck
Jack Barrett

Illuminated Tree with Afterimages (walking around left and walking around right), 2023
Dylan Vandenhoeck
Jack Barrett

As imaginative and unrestrained as they appear, Dylan Vandenhoeck’s febrile landscapes are methodical distillations of everyday sensory processes, like sight and working memory. Working primarily en plein air, Vandenhoeck incorporates a broad network of data, including information that our brains normally unconsciously filter out, in order to impart a sense of full-bodied experience.

These data range from peripheral vision of the nose or eyelashes catching light, to entoptic phenomena, sometimes called “floaters,” in which tiny structures in the eye itself become discernible. “Laying down this kind of embodied perspective in paint does often surprise me in the fantastical forms it can take,” said Vandenhoeck. “The result is all the more satisfying to me because it is tethered to life, hinging on an external logic bigger than myself.”

In addition to spending hours on site, he deepens his observations through visual and non-visual documentation, taking notes or recording voice memos to preserve the “senses, thoughts, or conversations” he finds in a given environment. In externalizing and unifying these perceptual structures—what he calls “the things perceptible within perception itself”—Vandenhoeck’s works lend a psychic intensity to everyday reality.

Browse available fantastical landscape paintings in the collection “Fantastical Landscapes.”

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