About the Exhibition
This exhibition is on view throughout The Hive restaurant’s dining room and bar.
Reality and fantasy, the enchanted and the everyday, intertwine in the imagery presented in this exhibition: animals, plants, and landscapes. While the subjects of photographs by Alessandra Sanguinetti and Laura Lee Brown were captured live in locations around the globe, the animals in Chris Roberts-Antieu’s fabric tableaux recall fairy tales, and Mitch Eckert’s layered composites are sourced from photos he took of dioramas in various natural history museums, bringing together species and habitats that wouldn’t coexist in the natural world. This spectrum reflects the variety of relationships between humans and animals, from pets to collected specimens to figments of the imagination, imbued with meaning and magic. Roos Holleman’s portrait of a taxidermy bird of paradise enlarges the once-living specimen that inspired this work. Describing her practice, the artists says: “They are subjects with a tactile exterior, but often with something going on underneath their surface. I am a kind of shaman, using crayons to blow life into un-living things.”
Floral imagery is transformed in works by Valerie Hegarty and Sebaastian Bremer, expanding the symbolic and expressive power of flowers and trees to address issues of identity, migration, disease, and environmental degradation. Hegarty’s three-dimensional Five Tulips with Frame Elegy transforms her source material from an homage to beauty and wealth into a contemporary meditation on the cyclical nature of life and the complexity of the current human condition. Bremer applies his unique painting on photography in Lemon Tree, which pays homage to his subject’s seeming eternal and inspiring lifespan; the artist describes trees as “perfect recording devices of air and time, outliving us and stretching across centuries in some cases- they live but in a different speed than humans, a comforting presence, and at the same time cleaning our air and providing us with shadow and shelter.”
The views of landscapes by Sarah Anne Johnson and Sakarin Krue-On mix memory, imagination, and reality to reflect upon human perception and human intervention into the environments depicted in their works. Johnson honors the art historical tradition of the landscape in Blue Sky and Birds, while incorporating manufactured materials, like the iridescent birds made from holographic tape, to undermine the concept of “high art,” blurring reality and the assumed reliability of photography is a medium. “How are photographs connected to reality and how is that connection changing? How can we idealize nature with the knowledge of our globally threatened environment?” asks Johnson.
Titled with the numerals indicating their geographic location, Krue-On’s Chronicle of the Landscape series photographs depict a lake and a mountain range, all of which were man-made. The artist explains that he composed the images so as to evoke “traces of romantic paintings, a mysterious origin and awe-inspiring grandeur of nature, the sublime that remind us of being a small element in the vast world. The landscape in each person’s memory is different but here even the landscape itself is different from what it was in the past. This lake is a result of the transformation of the area once was a forest, mountain ranges and stream. It is a result of the intervention of humankind that
changed the meaning of nature and the history of the area forever.” Krue-On acknowledges that his vision of these landscapes will differ from others’ memories of the same locations, as human perception is shaped by more than just visual sight: “As we realize that the meaning of what we see is not just what is visible to the eye but a combination of our knowledge, attitude, and experience, we should be aware of our role as a humankind who is a result of the past that are existing and shaping the future of history.”
