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Guest curated by Adler Guerrier and Laura Novoa featuring Andrea Bowers, Sandi Haber Fifield, David Hartt, Jim Hodges, Ebony G. Patterson, and Onajide Shabaka and newly commissioned works by Ema Ri and Cristina Lei Rodriguez. The exhibition is on view through February 5, 2022.

A landscape longed for: the garden as disturbance explores the motif of the garden as used by artists in its relation to the cultivation and expression of beauty and knowledge. The works in the exhibition function around images and objects connected to and derived from the study of plants, prompting a reimagining and reinterpretation of the garden as a site for the lyrical arrangement of forms. 

As the title suggests, within the implementation of order, there exist tendencies towards disruption and anticipation that challenge and inform our sense of worldbuilding. In the way that the “world cannot be left out of the garden,” the exhibition considers how the garden operates on the imaginary, attending to our needs and emotions, stimulating the senses, staging instances of joy, and insisting on living well as liberation.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Andrea Bowers lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. Bowers received her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 1992. Over the last twenty-three years, she has built an international reputation for her drawings, videos, and installations, which deal with social issues ranging from women's’ and workers’ rights to climate change and immigration.

Since the 1980s, Sandi Haber Fifield’s work has explored the visual, psychological and formal possibilities in creating composite pictures, whether it is the layering of images in the analog process of multiple exposure in-camera or by challenging logic and blowing apart the traditional expectation of ordered images on a wall.

David Hartt creates work that unpacks the social, cultural, and economic complexities of his various subjects. He explores how historic ideas and ideals persist or transform over time.
Born in Montréal in 1967, he lives and works in Philadelphia where he is an Associate Professor, in the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania.

Jim Hodges is known for his singular ability to infuse emotion and narrative into the objects of daily life, creating poignant studies based in temporality, life, and love. Since the late 1980s, Hodges’ poetic reconsiderations of the material world have inspired a wide-ranging body of work. 

Ebony G. Patterson's multilayered practice– in painting, sculpture, installation, performance, and video– uses beauty as a tool to address global social and political injustices. Her immersive gardens grow out of a complex entanglement of race, gender, class, and violence. Patterson seduces the viewer into acknowledging a darker truth lurking ominously beneath the surface.

Cristina Lei Rodriguez lives and works in Miami, FL. She received her BA from Middlebury College in 1996, and MFA from California College of Art in 2002. The objects Rodriguez creates take many forms, but all are made from common materials that are given a new intangible life. Her work is organic and minimalist, yet pristinely finished; echoing a tension between the natural and the artificial. 

Ema Ri’s work is procedural, layered, and expressive in nature and in many ways a reflection of themself. Rather than communicating with words, or using some kind of visual narrative to illustrate a story or moment in time, they’re driven by an innate desire to use materials that are often seen in the home and workplace. These materials, when taken apart and manipulated over a period of time, are then combined to create an assemblage that encompasses various elements of their history, identity, and psychology.

Onajide Shabaka has lived in California and Florida where his art practice is connected through historical/biographical themes related to geography that include African diaspora and Native American cultures. Using ethnobotany and the performative as aesthetic vehicles for making those references, its historical reconstruction, his art practice comes into being through the complex effects of institutions, histories, and human experiences. Additionally, Shabaka’s writing and curatorial practice focuses largely on contemporary art and culture, and subject specific research. Represented by Emerson Dorsch Gallery

The exhibition is made possible with additional support from Gander & White.