Artist Statement

I can’t recall exactly when I discovered that I have a green thumb, but I remember that in college, a friend’s newfound love of peculiar looking plants began to rub off on me one spring semester. Soon after, I began to slowly amass my own eclectic collection of indoor foliage as well, and years later, my home looks to be heavily influenced by the wave of “house jungle” aesthetic in our current moment.

In recent years, many articles have been written about this trend, with varying theories as to what has led to a leafy surge in so many interior spaces. Some go as far as to say that houseplants are filling a void of human relationships, while others cite the physical health benefits of bringing nature into our dwellings. I might not go as far as the former and I certainly hope for the latter, but I most believe that having touchpoints to nature and the opportunity of witnessing a living thing change over time is formative and compelling to us on some fundamental level. Many of us see nature as an escape, a balm, a respite, and to be able to bring a small element of that into our highly industrialized, technology-driven, and fast-paced lives helps us to stay just a little more tethered to the analog rhythms we’re inherently wired for but so inconsistently attuned to in our modern lives. I like to imagine that our subconscious minds are drawn to the predictable, unhurried pace and routine that a plant insists upon. Their presence serves as a steady mark of the regular passage of time, of endurance through seasons, of things continuing to steadily grow and be, even as we ourselves encounter the chaos of complex human life. And the vast variety and intricacy of these living things delights us and fills us with wonder, all the better to bring that into our midst and know it more intimately. All of this became much more evident to me when the global pandemic hit, and I suddenly found myself spending much more time in my own home, with a growing, evolving jungle of houseplants. And on a simpler level, what they brought to my abruptly smaller sphere of daily life was a precious element of joy and beauty in a chaotic time.

Through this exhibition, I hope to highlight a selection of the plants that are becoming more and more ubiquitous in our everyday spaces, in a format that exudes a degree of the whimsy, life, and vibrancy that houseplants do. These works are inspired in part by the Pop Art movement, which often sought to render the familiar and/or mundane, those things which have become so vernacular that to elevate them in the form of attention-grabbing art was to iconify them as a significant thread in the tapestry of culture. I hope that this particular thread in our cultural moment is not a fleeting fad, but actually the unfolding of an understanding that we do well to bring more of the natural world back into our midst, and to spend time tending to it.