“I’m going to give you a show that you’ve never had before,” says multimedia artist Ebony G. Patterson at the preview of her show “Things come to thrive…in the shedding…in the molting,” a major large-scale exhibition of sculptural and horticultural installations at the New York Botanical Garden, on view through September 17.
The work at NYBG parallels themes shown in Patterson’s 2018 show at the Perez Art Museum, Miami “…while the dew is still on the roses,” which utilized robust blooms of man-made materials to investigate more thought-provoking ideas. “In recent years, I’ve been using the garden as a metaphor for post-colonial space,” she says. “I think in many ways, we’re still living in a colonial period. A lot of my work is an attempt at speaking about histories of violence, but not a history that’s necessarily in the past.”
