‘… things come to thrive … in the shedding … in the molting …’
Through Oct. 22 at the New York Botanical Garden, 2900 Southern Boulevard, the Bronx; nybg.org.
A culmination of Ebony G. Patterson’s residency at the New York Botanical Garden, this exhibition includes work installed across several floors of the Garden’s library — but it’s the cast-foam vultures she’s planted on the lawn of its Enid A. Haupt Conservatory that cut the deepest. Gracefully lending substance and depth to the flowers they stand among, they come in four varieties — standing, turning, browsing and jutting forward — and what a strict accounting would call several different colors, though they all read as more or less black. Inside the Conservatory, where Patterson has also installed cast-glass leaves and body parts, the mood turns chillier. Dismembered feet sticking out over potted petunias evoke slavery and colonial violence. Ghostly white plant forms modeled on extinct species might refer to race, or to climate catastrophe, or to the insatiable emptiness of our information age. However you read the details, though, the triumph, both inside and out, is in the way that Patterson’s art enhances the botanical exhibits. Read the review.
