The Palest of Green, Pink and Mauve
The Palest of Green, Pink and Mauve
The Palest of Green, Pink and Mauve
MARZENA ABRAHAMIK
COLE LU
HEIDI NORTON
HANNAH TARR
CAMAYUHS
OCTOBER 20 – NOVEMBER 25, 2017
BY LOGAN LOCKNER
DECEMBER 20, 2017
ATLANTA, GEORGIA | RESPONSE
CAMAYUHS
OCTOBER 20 – NOVEMBER 25, 2017
BY LOGAN LOCKNER
DECEMBER 20, 2017
ATLANTA, GEORGIA | RESPONSE
CAMAYUHS
OCTOBER 20 – NOVEMBER 25, 2017
BY LOGAN LOCKNER
DECEMBER 20, 2017
ATLANTA, GEORGIA | RESPONSE
MARZENA ABRAHAMIK
COLE LU
HEIDI NORTON
HANNAH TARR
MARZENA ABRAHAMIK
COLE LU
HEIDI NORTON
HANNAH TARR
Keeping houseplants first became popular following the Industrial Revolution, and a contemporary trend shows a notable resurgence in the practice today. The aesthetics and anxieties of caring for plants are central concerns of artist Heidi Norton’s work, including two sculptures recently on view in The Palest of Green, Pink, and Mauve, the inaugural exhibition at the Atlanta artist-run space Camayuhs. (The space’s name also has botanical connections; it’s an inventive ear spelling of a markedly Southern pronunciation of camellias, which surround the home of artist Jamie Steele, where Camayuhs is located.)
In Norton’s sculpture Spirals, a tall stalk of bamboo is pressed between transparent sheets of vinyl, glass, and resin, its leafy tip protruding from the top in a twisted curlicue. Other forms—including colored water beads, electrodes, test tubes, and a smaller stalk of bamboo—are fully encased within the sculpture, giving the impression of flowers pressed in a book or depicted in a photograph. Standing freely on a base of squat aluminum legs, the sculpture contains elements that are both living and inanimate, organic and artificial.
Spirals allows the viewer to consider plants in multiple dimensions, as represented objects but also active material, and this sense of dualism and contradiction pervades the whole exhibition. The leaves of a plastic fern appear to sprout from a glass bottle onto blocks of wax and resin streaked with blue, purple, and black in Norton’s other sculpture, terra incognito (Dead Horse Bay). By incorporating living and faux plants into sculpture, Norton alternates between casting them as subject and object, challenging perceptions of plants passively existing for care and consumption.
Marzena Abrahamik’s photograph Jordan and Monica shows a hazy scene where two naked female figures share a joint in a bathtub surrounded by plants: aloe nestled in a windowsill, vines dangling from the shower rod, a bouquet deposited on the nearby toilet seat. The image’s sensual richness evokes the intensity of an idealized memory or fading dream. In another photograph from Abrahamik’s Girl Play series, the wittily titled Cotton Mouth, a potted cannabis plant spreads across a crumpled pink backdrop. Though Jordan and Monica depicts cannabis use and offers a lush vision of its effects, Cotton Mouth counterintuitively reframes marijuana as a houseplant in a bright photographic still life.
In charmingly mischievous paintings on unprimed canvas, Atlanta-based artist Hannah Tarr shows vaguely rendered smiling faces, fairies, and flowers. Tarr’s playful, loose style allows her to layer images on top of each other in elaborate and expressive ways. Her paintings Faery and Garden Spirit consider imagery from folklore and the natural world as a way of exploring exchanges between nature, culture, and individual subjectivity.
In addition to the overlapping images of yucca plants printed on her curtain installation Nearly Natural Greens, Brooklyn artist Cole Lu takes another image from nature, the waves of the ocean, as the primary visual metaphor in her video But, You Know, It’s Often All I Want. Digitally cropped and suspended on a field of pink light, the waves’ morphing shape becomes an object lesson on the fluid nature of context and meaning. A narrator encourages the viewer to imagine themselves floating “on a rubber raft into a big pot of boredom… stirring it, perhaps, every once and awhile.” Living in an era of political and ecological disasters often requires urgent, decisive action, but it also amplifies the importance of rituals for relief and restoration: breathing along with a guided meditation, smoking a joint with a friend, watering your houseplants.
Keeping houseplants first became popular following the Industrial Revolution, and a contemporary trend shows a notable resurgence in the practice today. The aesthetics and anxieties of caring for plants are central concerns of artist Heidi Norton’s work, including two sculptures recently on view in The Palest of Green, Pink, and Mauve, the inaugural exhibition at the Atlanta artist-run space Camayuhs. (The space’s name also has botanical connections; it’s an inventive ear spelling of a markedly Southern pronunciation of camellias, which surround the home of artist Jamie Steele, where Camayuhs is located.)
In Norton’s sculpture Spirals, a tall stalk of bamboo is pressed between transparent sheets of vinyl, glass, and resin, its leafy tip protruding from the top in a twisted curlicue. Other forms—including colored water beads, electrodes, test tubes, and a smaller stalk of bamboo—are fully encased within the sculpture, giving the impression of flowers pressed in a book or depicted in a photograph. Standing freely on a base of squat aluminum legs, the sculpture contains elements that are both living and inanimate, organic and artificial.
Spirals allows the viewer to consider plants in multiple dimensions, as represented objects but also active material, and this sense of dualism and contradiction pervades the whole exhibition. The leaves of a plastic fern appear to sprout from a glass bottle onto blocks of wax and resin streaked with blue, purple, and black in Norton’s other sculpture, terra incognito (Dead Horse Bay). By incorporating living and faux plants into sculpture, Norton alternates between casting them as subject and object, challenging perceptions of plants passively existing for care and consumption.
Marzena Abrahamik’s photograph Jordan and Monica shows a hazy scene where two naked female figures share a joint in a bathtub surrounded by plants: aloe nestled in a windowsill, vines dangling from the shower rod, a bouquet deposited on the nearby toilet seat. The image’s sensual richness evokes the intensity of an idealized memory or fading dream. In another photograph from Abrahamik’s Girl Play series, the wittily titled Cotton Mouth, a potted cannabis plant spreads across a crumpled pink backdrop. Though Jordan and Monica depicts cannabis use and offers a lush vision of its effects, Cotton Mouth counterintuitively reframes marijuana as a houseplant in a bright photographic still life.
In charmingly mischievous paintings on unprimed canvas, Atlanta-based artist Hannah Tarr shows vaguely rendered smiling faces, fairies, and flowers. Tarr’s playful, loose style allows her to layer images on top of each other in elaborate and expressive ways. Her paintings Faery and Garden Spirit consider imagery from folklore and the natural world as a way of exploring exchanges between nature, culture, and individual subjectivity.
In addition to the overlapping images of yucca plants printed on her curtain installation Nearly Natural Greens, Brooklyn artist Cole Lu takes another image from nature, the waves of the ocean, as the primary visual metaphor in her video But, You Know, It’s Often All I Want. Digitally cropped and suspended on a field of pink light, the waves’ morphing shape becomes an object lesson on the fluid nature of context and meaning. A narrator encourages the viewer to imagine themselves floating “on a rubber raft into a big pot of boredom… stirring it, perhaps, every once and awhile.” Living in an era of political and ecological disasters often requires urgent, decisive action, but it also amplifies the importance of rituals for relief and restoration: breathing along with a guided meditation, smoking a joint with a friend, watering your houseplants.
Keeping houseplants first became popular following the Industrial Revolution, and a contemporary trend shows a notable resurgence in the practice today. The aesthetics and anxieties of caring for plants are central concerns of artist Heidi Norton’s work, including two sculptures recently on view in The Palest of Green, Pink, and Mauve, the inaugural exhibition at the Atlanta artist-run space Camayuhs. (The space’s name also has botanical connections; it’s an inventive ear spelling of a markedly Southern pronunciation of camellias, which surround the home of artist Jamie Steele, where Camayuhs is located.)
In Norton’s sculpture Spirals, a tall stalk of bamboo is pressed between transparent sheets of vinyl, glass, and resin, its leafy tip protruding from the top in a twisted curlicue. Other forms—including colored water beads, electrodes, test tubes, and a smaller stalk of bamboo—are fully encased within the sculpture, giving the impression of flowers pressed in a book or depicted in a photograph. Standing freely on a base of squat aluminum legs, the sculpture contains elements that are both living and inanimate, organic and artificial.
Spirals allows the viewer to consider plants in multiple dimensions, as represented objects but also active material, and this sense of dualism and contradiction pervades the whole exhibition. The leaves of a plastic fern appear to sprout from a glass bottle onto blocks of wax and resin streaked with blue, purple, and black in Norton’s other sculpture, terra incognito (Dead Horse Bay). By incorporating living and faux plants into sculpture, Norton alternates between casting them as subject and object, challenging perceptions of plants passively existing for care and consumption.
Marzena Abrahamik’s photograph Jordan and Monica shows a hazy scene where two naked female figures share a joint in a bathtub surrounded by plants: aloe nestled in a windowsill, vines dangling from the shower rod, a bouquet deposited on the nearby toilet seat. The image’s sensual richness evokes the intensity of an idealized memory or fading dream. In another photograph from Abrahamik’s Girl Play series, the wittily titled Cotton Mouth, a potted cannabis plant spreads across a crumpled pink backdrop. Though Jordan and Monica depicts cannabis use and offers a lush vision of its effects, Cotton Mouth counterintuitively reframes marijuana as a houseplant in a bright photographic still life.
In charmingly mischievous paintings on unprimed canvas, Atlanta-based artist Hannah Tarr shows vaguely rendered smiling faces, fairies, and flowers. Tarr’s playful, loose style allows her to layer images on top of each other in elaborate and expressive ways. Her paintings Faery and Garden Spirit consider imagery from folklore and the natural world as a way of exploring exchanges between nature, culture, and individual subjectivity.
In addition to the overlapping images of yucca plants printed on her curtain installation Nearly Natural Greens, Brooklyn artist Cole Lu takes another image from nature, the waves of the ocean, as the primary visual metaphor in her video But, You Know, It’s Often All I Want. Digitally cropped and suspended on a field of pink light, the waves’ morphing shape becomes an object lesson on the fluid nature of context and meaning. A narrator encourages the viewer to imagine themselves floating “on a rubber raft into a big pot of boredom… stirring it, perhaps, every once and awhile.” Living in an era of political and ecological disasters often requires urgent, decisive action, but it also amplifies the importance of rituals for relief and restoration: breathing along with a guided meditation, smoking a joint with a friend, watering your houseplants.
Camayuhs is an artist run, diy exhibition space located in the Peachtree Hills neighborhood of Atlanta, Georgia. Programming aims to highlight emerging and mid-career artists via presentations of group and two person exhibitions.
camayuhs.com
Logan Lockner is a writer living in Atlanta. His essays and criticism have appeared in Art Papers, Number, Photograph, and elsewhere, and he is a contributing editor for Burnaway.
All images courtesy of Camayuhs.
RESPONSE
A feature of project reviews experienced in person. Response will provide artists with much needed critical response to their work. Response is opinion-based but is not an op-ed.