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The Greenhouse
Mohamad Berry
Jenny Holzer appropriates the technique of monumentally overwhelming the senses to conceal the fact that her texts carry messages that can be shocking, evocative, disturbing, disgusting, or painful. When Holzer locates her text-based work in emotion, she succeeds in freeing it from the purely intellectual sphere. This work develops a visual power customarily attributed to pictures, transforming the places where they appear into lasting images. What we remember about the projections is not primarily content, but rather the altered images of familiar places, newly “described” in her visual language. The Greenhouse is a project at the edge of Los Angeles that raises questions of territory, communication, and belonging. It is an urban vitrine in continuous conversation with the city, giving and receiving visual triggers in the form of projections and LED displays. The greenhouse typology, not usually designed for humans as its main users, is adapted as a manifestation of an art space because of the integral role that light plays in the process of plant production—a characteristic that links back to a main focus in much of Holzer’s work. The continuous 380-meter-long exposed greenhouse, together with the darker, more playful spaces within its retaining wall tucked into topography, become a vivid work of art, where the viewer and the viewed both exist within the realm of a third, much stronger influence: the presence or absence of light. In this context, the topic of sustainability and environmental awareness adds to Holzer’s usual themes, where her iconic phrase, “Protect me from what I want,” now takes on a whole new layer of human greed and ignorance toward ecological issues.