At the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut, a group show inaugurates the museum’s new sculpture garden, with works prompting questions about what gardens have been and can still be.
Perhaps more than any other art form, gardens give us particular, material insight into the relationships between humans and their environment. So proposed the renowned garden historian John Dixon Hunt, who described gardens as “sophisticated… deliberate… and complex in their mixture of culture and nature.” Gardens have been sites for the display of immense power over the earth, as in Louis XIV’s Versailles, but they have also provided spaces for resistance, as in the subsistence gardens enslaved peoples cultivated in the American South. Titled “A Garden of Promise and Dissent,” the exhibition at the Aldrich deliberately engages this wide range of garden histories.
Rachelle Dang’s Seedling Carrier (2019) echoes human attempts to control nature on a global scale. Based on eighteenth-century innovations that allowed imperial explorers to transport living plant matter on yearslong oceanic voyages, Dang’s wood and aluminum carrier is filled with broken pots and surrounded by scattered ceramic seed pods. Rendered entirely in white, the sculpture’s ghostly presence indicates that despite attempts at care and containment, many plants did not survive the journey.
Global exchange takes on a different resonance in work by Guyanese artist Suchitra Mattai. In the intrepid garden (2023), a tapestry of worn saris is punctuated by decorative shelves holding small sculptures based on European porcelain figurines that depict pastoral fantasies of a harmonious, effortless relation to nature. Against the vibrant colors of the tapestry, the sculptures’ glaring whiteness and saccharine imagery offers a comment on the legacy of British colonialism in Guyana; cast in salt, they allude to the oceanic transit on which colonialism depended. After the abolition of slavery, sugar was cultivated by Indian indentured laborers, including Mattai’s ancestors, and the intrepid garden also evokes the degradation of Guyanese soil through extensive sugar plantations.
More contemporary and commercial attempts to manipulate nature arise in Jill Magid’s contribution. Magid explores the “Richards Function,” a mathematical model used to optimize the length of flower stems and coordinate their growth with the demands of the market. Her A Model for Chrysanthemum Stem Elongation where y is 52” (2023) stretches 52 inches high, the maximum height a chrysanthemum stem can reach and a measure that corresponds to the value of the flower. Drawn in neon lights, the sculpture’s glaringly unnatural medium reinforces the artificiality of the cut flower market.
The prominent inclusion of hands in two of the show’s works remind us that whatever they symbolize, gardens require tending. Cathy Lu’s Nuwa (Gold) (2023) is a porcelain sculpture of arms stretching upward, based on the mother goddess Nuwa of Chinese mythology. The figure is punctuated with holes holding tiny grape stems, a nod to the role Chinese immigrants played in cultivating vineyards in California’s Sonoma Valley. Kelly Akashi’s Life Forms (Labellum) (2023) has the artist’s own hands cast in bronze, cradling a glass orchid. Blowing glass, Akashi literally breathes life into her art, emphasizing the reciprocity between body and ground that gardening requires.
The Aldrich’s wooded surrounds are part of a long history of colonialism—Ridgefield was the site of a number of Revolutionary War skirmishes and is on the ancestral homelands of Wappinger and Munsee Lenape Peoples—and the exhibition thoughtfully critiques some enduring colonial orientations to the environment. Yet none of this show’s social commentary contradicts the idea that a garden is so often site of pleasure. The works on view are materially lush and visually resplendent, delighting in the possibilities for color and texture that nature affords.
This meeting point of pleasure and critique arrives at an unstable climax in Brandon Ndife’s Shade Tree (2022/2024). Ndife cast an array of domestic furniture in matte gray polyurethane resin and arranged it invitingly in the museum’s garden. Upon approach, however, the sculptures contain a number of unsettling assemblages, with what look to be heavy wooden tabletops resting on collapsible camp chairs. The shade trees of the title refer to the environmental inequities of urban landscapes that are often hotter than shaded, suburban enclaves; tellingly, despite the propensity of trees around the Aldrich grounds, the sculptures sit in the open lawn, exposed to the elements. Ndife’s work is like a garden in that it seems familiar, yet is full of layered histories. To return to Hunt’s terms, it is sophisticated, deliberate, and complex.
