Contemporary Photography and the Garden:
Deceits and Fantasies
January 20–April 17
Gardens have always represented the efforts of civilization to tame nature. This exhibition brings together more than 70 images of gardens—from Japan, Indonesia, Europe, India, South America, and the United States—as seen by 16 photographers. The works depict a range of cultural manifestations, from tranquil and seductive havens to places of tension, where exquisite beauty seems to exist uneasily with inexorable forces of nature.
Among the lyrical and luxuriant are Sally Apfelbaum's mural-sized, multiple-exposure chromogenic prints of Monet's garden at Giverny; Linda Hackett's hallucinogenic color-pinhole photographs of Long Island gardens; Sally Gall's silver-gelatin images of verdant gardens in Brazil and Hawaii; Sally Mann's images of jungle gardens in Mexico; and the panoramic silver-gelatin photographs of Italian gardens by Geoffrey James. Also among these images are Len Jenshel's intensely hued photographs of gardens in California and South Carolina; Erica Lennard's rich silver-gelatin prints documenting the sculptural forms and textures of Japanese gardens; and Jack Pierson's vividly colored photographs of tightly focused, detailed compositions in which a single element within the garden is often isolated.
In contrast to the notion of the garden as an idyllic site for the pursuit of pleasure are works that suggest more ominous views of gardens as metaphors for the manipulation of nature. These include images by Lynn Geesaman and Jean Rault, whose silver-gelatin photographs present gardens as menacing places, where artificiality seems to repel rather than invite human interaction. Gregory Crewdson's carefully constructed tableaux show gardens that hint of nature run amuck, while Marc Quinn's Italian Landscapesfeatures a garden comprised of flowers frozen in silicone and presented in a refrigerated glass-enclosed environment.
Other artists emphasize the garden as a work of art in its own right: Daniel Boudinet's luminous cibachrome prints depict the sculptor Ian Hamilton Finlay's garden, Little Sparta, in Scotland. In their room-size installation, the team of Fischli and Weiss surrounds the viewer with projected images that reveal a kaleidoscopic vision of the cycle of growth and decay in a single year.
The exhibition is accompanied by an ambitious catalogue, with texts by curator Thomas Padon, artists Ronald Jones and Shirin Neshat, and distinguished literary scholar Robert Pogue Harrison. (See associated events, below.) The exhibition is organized by the American Federation of Arts and made possible, in part, by a grant from the A. R. Brooks Trust and the Founders Circle of the AFA. At Middlebury it is supported by the Christian A. Johnson Memorial Fund.
Associated events
A garden party and festive opening celebration of this exhibition takes place on Thursday, January 20, at 4:30 p.m., with curatorial remarks at 5:00 p.m. The opening is free and open to the public.
**THIS EVENT CANCELLED**
On Tuesday, March 15, Robert Pogue Harrison, chair of the Department of French and Italian at Stanford University and author of Forests: The Shadow of Civilization (1992) and Dominion of the Dead (2003) gives a lecture entitled "Gardens in the Western Imagination"**at4:30 p.m. in the Harman Periodicals Reading Area of the new library. Cosponsored by the Middlebury College Museum of Art, the Department of French, and Cook Commons, this event is free and open to the public.
Lecture by Michael Singer
Michael Singer, sculptor and designer of Garden of the Seasons, discusses his new sculpture at Middlebury. Co-sponsored by the Department of History of Art and Architecture, Environmental Studies, and Atwater Commons. The free lecture takes place on Tuesday, February 8 at 4:30 P.M. in the Harman Periodicals Reading Area of the new library.
Art Now: Recent Middlebury College Presidential Portraits
January 20–August 14
Art Nowis an ongoing exhibition series that presents contemporary works in avariety of media. This installation presents portraits of three Middlebury College presidents, commissioned over the past 15 years. At its focus is a newly created hologram portrait of President Emeritus John M. McCardell Jr. A hologram renders its subject in three dimensions that change, in both parallax and perspective, as the viewer moves. While official portraits have a long and distinguished history as institutional symbols, holographic portraiture has barely entered its formative years. Included in the exhibition are portraits of Olin Robison (1989) by Jack Beal and of Timothy Light (1998) by Kate Gridley.
Ongoing Exhibitions
Ancient and Asian Art from the Collection
Lower Gallery
A French limestone Head of a King, on loan from the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, joins this fine installation of Western antiquities and Asian objects.
European and American Art from the Collection
Cerf Gallery
On view this term are works from the permanent collection selected to illustrate Western art history from the Renaissance through the 19th century. An added attraction is Leatherstocking's Rescue II, a painting by American eccentric John Quidor, on loan from Bowdoin.