Strange Vegetation
Yevgeniya Kaganovich
(in collaboration with Nathaniel Stern)
June 8th-July 25th, 2011
Opening Reception: Wednesday, June 8th, 5:30-8:30 pm, 2011
Opening Reception Slide Show
Gallery Talk: Thursday, June 16th, 7pm – Jennifer Johung
Villa Terrace Decorative Arts Museum
2220 North Terrace Avenue
Milwaukee, WI 53202
Strange Vegetation grows an ecological system out of the Villa Terrace Decorative Arts Museum’s unique decorative interior. It is a site-specific installation incorporated with the repeated pattern of exotic greenery and floral iron work on the walls around it. Here, a system of physically interconnected and identical plant-like forms project, as bulbous roots, from the floor. Their stalks reach from below painted skirting to the wallpaper above. Over a dozen of these large latex volumes slowly breathe in and out, an inflation and deflation cycle that gradually distorts each form.
Strange Vegetation germinates and mutates the wallpaper’s images into living and breathing things; where paint and wallpaper meet becomes the ground from which foliage sprouts; and these inflated volumes interweave with one another and the implied life of the cultural institution.
The Villa Terrace is intended to accumulate and preserve the products of human time. Strange Vegetation, then, thinks beyond this life cycle – in Earth time. It is a fantastical organism that uses the museum as a seed, transforming it from space, to habitat, to ecosystem in an imagined future. Strange Vegetation suggests that all built environments are (a) vibrant matter with the capacity for their own movement, change and agency over time.