The impulse to create a garden on the sidewalk as Clint has done is ambitious (and yet humble), generous, and subversive. It’s a grounding gesture; an engagement with creating something authentic, mindful, and concrete (out of the concrete). Roenisch’s guerilla garden provides a touchstone for he and his family, for artists, viewers, the community, and for Wild Inside.Each of the artists in the exhibition unearths the potential of the garden as a nourishing, curative, creative, radical endeavor. HaeAhn Kwon presents sculptural seed mounds that fuse the structural with the generative. Tania Kitchell’s living room garden plots suggest benign, creeping reclamation. Lorna Bauer’s photographs exalt and synthesize the work of Brazilian modernist landscape architect Burle Marx. Vanessa Brown’s Robes For Sleepwalking and Daydreamingare suffused with botany and hint at other, liminal worlds. Maryanne Casasanta’s erotic blossoms and shadow-play are fecund and suggestively ripe, while Diane Borsato’s opening-night-only organic Arrangements mark the fleeting beauty and formal rigour of ikebana. Altogether the exuberant and the ornamental, the manicured and the messy, the porosity of interior and exterior, is foregrounded and excavated.
– Pamela Meredith
