Contemporary Photography and the Garden |
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| Saturday, 22 October 2005 17:17 |
 COLUMBIA, SC.-Contemporary Photography and the Garden - Deceits and Fantasies looks at gardens as a subject in photography produced in the last decade by 16 American and European artists. Ranging from depictions of gardens as tranquil havens to places of tension, where beauty coexists with inexorable forces of nature, the photographs reveal varied responses to the physical structure, atmosphere and symbolism of the garden. Among the nearly 70 images on view are depictions of Claude Monet's Giverny, as well as gardens in Scotland, Japan, Indonesia, India, Brazil, Mexico and the United States. The photographs represent the remarkable diversity of these international gardens. In addition to beautiful images of gardens from around the world, the exhibition also explores darker visual metaphors for the garden, presenting gardens as ominous places or fantasies through various photographic manipulations of the images.
The artists included in the exhibition are Sally Apfelbaum, Daniel Boudinet, Gregory Crewdson, Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Sally Gall, Lynn Geesaman, Linda Hackett, Geoffrey James, Len Jenshel, Erica Lennard, Sally Mann, Catherine Opie, Jack Pierson, Jean Rault and Marc Quinn. An exciting feature of Contemporary Photography and the Garden - Deceits and Fantasies is the commissioning of new works by Sally Mann and Catherine Opie. Mann explores Englishman Edward James's surrealist garden in the jungle of San Luis Potosi in Mexico; Opie investigates the affinities among disparate gardens, ranging from estates in Santa Barbara and the Hamptons to community gardens in New York City and a men's prison in Minnesota. Some exhibition highlights include a room-sized installation by Fischli and Weiss that surrounds the viewer with projected images revealing the variety and kaleidoscopic color of plants in the garden; Sally Apfelbaum's mural-sized, multiple-exposure prints of Giverny reveal the lush and lavish atmosphere of the garden, as do Linda Hackett's color-pinhole photographs of Long Island gardens, and Sally Gall's silver-gelatin images of gardens in Brazil and Hawaii. The panoramic silver-gelatin photographs of Italian gardens by Geoffrey James; Len Jenshel's intensely hued photographs of gardens in California and South Carolina; and Erica Lennard's rich silver-gelatin prints documenting the sculptural forms and textures of Japanese gardens, all demonstrate the abundant beauty of the garden. Other artists play against the notion of a garden as an idyllic site and provide a dark visual metaphor for the manipulation of nature. Some of them, such as Lynn Geesaman and Jean Rault, create photographs that present gardens as places whose artificiality would seem to fend off human interaction.Click on logo below to add this article to your favorite Social Website ~ |
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