The Middlebury Campus

Issue date: 1/27/05 Section: Arts

Media Credit: Ari Joseph Alongside images of Monet´s Giverny, photographs of gardens from Scotland, Japan and Indonesia adorn the walls.

Pictures of surreal, Aztec-like encampments. Close-ups of vibrantly colored and silicone-preserved flowers. Snap shots of Claude Monet's water-lily park. Pin-hole prints of whooshing dandelions, and intimate, portraits of private estate backyards. Even images of the little planters from jailhouse grounds. Though varied in subject and perspective, these photographs all communicate the notion of the garden.

To commence its 2005 program, the Middlebury College Museum of Art has offered the opportunity to explore the real and fictitious world of cultivated landscapes. At once mystical and serene, eerie and frightening, the myriad photographs present ethereal and contemplative views of natural terrain. Entitled "Contemporary Photography and the Garden - Deceits and Fantasies," the exhibition features 67 photographs from sixteen American and European artists, diverging in design, scale, and color scheme. The headline is derived from a 13th-century poem, Roman De La Rose.

The first photographs in the exhibition represent the creative endeavors of Gregory Crewdson and set the reflective tone of the show. The untitled works materialize the imagination of Crewdson with fabricated spaces of flowers, butterflies, and hair braids. Colorful and lively just like the creatures that occupy the setting, Crewdson stages a fantastic garden, reminiscent of an Alice-in-Wonderland setting.

On the adjacent wall, Marc Quinn's "Italian landscape" series feature images of an aquarium-like atmosphere. In documenting a large scale installation of a 1997 garden comprised of flowers frozen in silicone and preserved in a refrigerated, enclosed environment, Quinn generates a sensational scene in which the color is intensely animated.

At the exhibition's crowded opening, on Thursday, Jan. 20, Tom Padon, the Deputy Director for Exhibitions and Programs of the American Federation of Arts, explained an inspiration for his second curatorial project. To renovate his quaint Berkshire house, Padon looked to landscaping as the means of re-inventing the standing structure. His creation of a garden compelled him to consider the subject and idea in a new perspective. It is with this mindset that Padon conceived his investigation into the beauty and rich metaphorical association of gardens.

Continued...

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