Gusts in the Hothouse, 2016
THE COLLECTION | Where Art Meets Fashion | Fashion Outlets of Chicago | Rosemont, IL
All of the photographs contained within Gusts in the Hothouse were taken in my garden, my mother’s garden, and public gardens near my home in Chicago and my parent’s home in Florida. Lately I have been reflecting on gardens as places where taxonomies and aesthetics intersect with unpredictable elements: as spaces defined by interactions of order, disorder, and temporality. My recent work has been focused on gardens as collections that are ephemeral, evolutionary, and seasonal. In gardens, interconnected systems grow and reproduce. Hybrids flourish. Gardens are portrayals of time. They are marked by seasonality; by various internal cycles of life moving at different speeds: interdependent systems blooming, growing, intertwining, and dying. They represent a kind of inertia toward disorder: our post-apocalyptic visions always feature cities overgrown, being consumed again by nature. I use the garden as a framework to explore the complex attachments formed, individually and institutionally, for what we collect: the tangible and the intangible.