Garden as Muse: Cultivating Vision Andrea Packard
From the lush abundance of Monet’s paintings of Giverny to Jeff Koons’ gaudy topiary, modern and contemporary artists have found gardens and botanical imagery to be potent sources of inspiration. This exhibition features the work of five contemporary artists: Sally Apfelbaum, Markus Baenziger, Syd Carpenter, Lois Dodd, and Sarah McEneaney, who demonstrate a career-long fascination with the dynamism of nature. Although they work in distinct styles and media, they all investigate the way our cultivation of nature, whether formally planned or unconsciously propagated, essentially shapes human experience. Whereas much art today emphasizes the cacophony of rapid change, these artists both acknowledge contemporary issues and revel in the persistence—and necessity—of beauty in our lives. Their exceptional creative integrity, conceptual insight, analytical rigor, and technical mastery produce representations of nature that are both alluring and profound.
"”” The quintessential interpreter of gardens is, of course, Claude Monet. From 1883 until his death in 1926, he sculpted his garden at Giverny and painted its dazzling vistas. His symphonic arrangement of flowers, lily ponds, trellises, and paths has become a pilgrimage site for gardeners and artists alike. Sally Apfelbaum produced two series of photographs there: Giverny, made during a six-month residency in 1989, and Giverny, Recent, made during a return visit in 2003. The daughter of a nurseryman who developed and propagated new species and a mother who is an artist, Apfelbaum grew up on a small farm. After earning degrees in psychology and photography, she was well prepared for the problematic opportunities at Giverny. The danger of such a residency is that one’s art might become cliché or derivative of Monet’s vision. However, as Apfelbaum studied the gardens, she elaborated a strategy she had developed the previous year during a residency at Ellis Island, N.Y. At Ellis Island, she noted that the historic buildings were aligned with the points of the compass and photographed them from those distinct viewpoints, layering the four exposures on a single four-by-five–inch negative to produce a composite image. The resulting photographs do not correspond to actual scenes one could view; they are convincing inventions. Unlike the ubiquitous postcard images of such sites, Apfelbaum’s process produced abrupt contrasts and ghostly visual echoes— effects that suggest shifts in perception, memory, and time. Rather than simply document appearances, her photographs represent each site as a nexus of perceptual, geographic, and cultural change. Sally Apfelbaum, Giverny #5, 1989/2004, Type C print, 30 x 40 inches.
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Apfelbaum’s alluring photographs of Giverny also emphasize artificial, ephemeral, and subjective processes. Her images celebrate the abundance and variety of flowering plants, yet she moves beyond the picturesque. The arcing pathways, wealth of detail, and large scale of works such as Giverny #5 (1989/2004) invite viewers to enter the scene, meander through it, examine the flora, and imagine distant structures. Yet even those unfamiliar with the artist’s process quickly see the echoes of differing exposures that contribute to a sense of motion, transition, and peripheral knowledge. Moreover, the combination of dye layers on the same negative creates color relationships that differ from the actual scene. One also finds areas in the photographs that dissolve into overlapping detail