By Sarah Yáñez-Richards |
New York (EFE) They don’t focus on the beauty of the place, but rather question how it makes them feel, as the Jamaican artist Ebony Patterson explains to EFE.
A part of the garden that surrounds the large greenhouse found in the Bronx park is plagued by this gathering of carrion birds that seem to peck at the colorful flowers.
“I am interested in thinking of vultures as a metaphor and their relationship with the act of caring. So the garden or the earth becomes a skin”, notes Patterson.
The artist also reveals another facet of scavengers, that of hunters. This aspect can be seen inside the glass greenhouse where the translucent white legs of people and the remains of vertebral columns emerge from the plants that the birds peck at.
Although the bird with the greatest prominence in this particular exhibition, which opens this May 27 for the general public, is a white peacock that crowns from a pedestal -with the appearance of still being built- one of the rooms of the greenhouse .
As Patterson explains, the peacock’s tail metaphorically continues through the other two sections of the greenhouse through the color and foliage of the plants, ending in a large fountain of red water, simulating blood.
Create a “stone in the shoe” in the Botanical Garden
Sound also plays an important role in this exhibition, since a disturbing recording plays in the three galleries of the greenhouse in which the chirping and pecking of birds are mixed, with sudden sounds like whipping and a woman’s voice that speaks slowly. and in a serious tone.
“Sound becomes another way to create a stone in the shoe. A small moment of discomfort or tension”, reveals the artist, who is known for her mixed media installations.
Patterson’s goal is to get people to go beyond the beauty of flowers and question where things come from.
“When people come to these gardens they fall in love with their beauty, but they rarely ask where the flowers come from. It’s not just looking at the name tag or reading where it comes from geographically, but how did it actually travel here? And on your journey, what else did you bring with you?” she adds.
Along with the plants in the botanical garden, Patterson has included 177 glass statues, also translucent white, of seven types of extinct plants, many of which were collected only once or twice before never to be seen again. .
Video y collage
In addition to the exhibition around and inside the iconic Bronx greenhouse, the show continues in the garden’s Mertz Library building, where the artist has a video installation and exhibition.
In the audiovisual part there are three screens that surround the viewer in a tropical forest that is inhabited by two androgynous figures, one dressed in white and the other in black.
While in the exhibition there is a sculpture made of hundreds of hands with red gloves and colorful three-dimensional collages hang on the walls, which in their center have words like “should” or “kiss” and around them flowers, hands, butterflies and plastic cockroaches.
Finally, the exhibition has an interactive part in which visitors are encouraged to write “things to remember” and post them below.
Some of the messages that can be read are: “This exhibition gives me goosebumps in a good way” or “it is disturbing”.