Vegetation

Simryn Gill

Exhibition: Mar 11 – Apr 18, 1999


Vegetation, Simryn Gill playfully notes, is inspired by her desire “to be a plant in the American landscape.” As a North Indian woman born in Singapore, raised in Malaysia and currently residing in Sydney, Australia, she knows something of what it means to be uprooted, to use a botanical metaphor Gill favors. In her first trip to the United States, she wanted to investigate the complexities that surround our ideas about what it means to be indigenous.

Gill’s quest took her in search of the wide open spaces for which the American West is famous. However, she found she had to travel for six hours through the West Texas landscape to find land not hemmed in by fences. There she briefly enacted her fantasy, bringing home the evidence in the form of a series of black and white photographs.

Becoming a plant was not an easy process. On locating the appropriate sites, Gill gathered native plants and brought them back to her studio. There she transformed them into face-obscuring headdresses. Then Gill returned to the original site where she, and occasionally several other plant-spirited accomplices, posed for photographs wearing the headdresses within the rugged Texas landscape.

Though Gill’s description of her enterprise is humorous, it has serious implications. One of Gill’s intentions was to bring out the philosophical, social and political paradoxes that surround questions of nature, land and identity. Take, for instance, the fences. Fences imply ownership of land, but land outlasts all its “owners.” Who really owns whom? Similarly, while political borders determine national identity and make indigenous humans into foreigners, plants ignore human borders. People may be defined by accidents of geography, but who has ever heard of an American or Mexican plant?

Gill also alludes to Western culture’s mind/body distinction. In the conventional hierarchy of life, she suggests, as human is to plant, so mind is to body. Thus, she and her comrades demonstrate, when humans cover their heads, which they regard as the seat of their rationality and identity, they can imagine they are invisible. Yet there their bodies are, visible for all to see.

In these photographs, Gill and her semi-camouflaged comrades rise above prairie grass, stand in front of barbed wire fences and sit along the banks of the Rio Grande, the region’s most powerful border. The absurdity of their half human- half plant personas is further evidence of the clash between the human artifice of boundaries and the mobility of vegetation.

Vegetation is an extension of Gill’s longtime use of horticulture as a metaphor for the human situation. This subject matter allows her to undermine the familiar dichotomy between nature and culture. As an Asian artist from a region of the world deeply marked by the history of Western colonization, she is well aware of the Western tendency to view the Asian Other as an embodiment of “nature” and thus implicitly inferior to the norm of culture and civilization embodied by the West. By deliberately confusing the languages of nature and culture, she demands that we question such assumptions.

Gill reveals how the vocabulary of horticulture parallels that of politics. For instance, she points out that in the human world, the word naturalization refers to the legal procedure by which a person achieves citizenship. In the plant world, it refers to the condition of a species which has started to populate itself in the wild. The definitions are similar, but one involves exclusionary legal regulations and the other a natural process. The nature vocabulary spills over in other ways as well. We speak of human populations disseminating their seed or uprooting themselves. Meanwhile, the old hierarchy which places culture over nature remains in place when we say that people vegetate or that those who have lost consciousness have become vegetables. This lexicon suggests that nature metaphors are deeply imbedded in human consciousness. Gill reminds us that even the most radical transformations of industry and modernity cannot obliterate them.

In earlier work, Gill has pursued such ideas in works which blur the line between nature and culture. She has inscribed texts on the leaves of plants and carved them into coconuts set adrift in the ocean. She has also added tiny wheels to pods and seeds from Australia and Malaysia, transforming them into miniature vehicles which represent the global spread of food-stuffs and technology. She has made a suit from coconut bark and created paper leaves for living plants from the pages of classic books which deal with human exploration and botanical evolution. In all these works, there is both a sly wit and a thoughtful consideration of the mythologies of human identity.

Vegetation is the latest of these explorations. The plant people sprouting from the West Texas landscape are both alien and peculiarly familiar. They are reminders that none of us can escape the matrix of conflicting identities imposed upon us by geography, politics, history and biology.

-Eleanor Heartney

Eleanor Heartney is a Contributing Editor of Art in America and author of Critical Condition: American Culture at the Crossroads.

Artist

Simryn Gill

Sydney, Australia

Born in 1959 in Singapore, Gill was raised in Malaysia and currently lives in Sydney, Australia. She has shown widely in Europe, Asia and Australia, including solo exhibitions at Kiasma, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, Finland; ArtSpace, Sydney, Australia; Substation Gallery, Singapore; Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide, Australia; and Rosalyn Oxley9 Gallery in Sydney, Australia, where she is represented. She has participated in a number of group shows and international festivals, including Skin Trilogy at the Malaysian National Art Gallery; TransCulture at the 1995 Venice Biennale, Italy; the 5th Istanbul Biennial, Turkey; and the 1994 Adelaide Biennial, Australia. Gill’s installation at ArtPace will travel to The Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia. This is Simryn Gill’s first exhibition in the United States.

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Curators

Amada Cruz

Los Angeles, CA
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Kellie Jones

New York, NY
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Nancy Rubins

Topanga, California, USA

Born in 1952 in Naples, Texas, Californian Nancy Rubins received her MFA from the University of California, Davis. She has had numerous solo exhibitions, including shows at Paul Kasmin Gallery, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Venice Biennale Aperto. Rubins’ work was included in the 1995 Whitney Biennial and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles’ Helter Skelter exhibit in 1992. Rubins teaches at the University of California, Los Angeles’ Art Department. She has received grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Tiffany Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

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Annette DiMeo Carlozzi

Austin, TX

Independent curator Annette DiMeo Carlozzi has built an expansive practice across the US as a curator of modern and contemporary art, focusing on ideas and experiences, artists and audiences. Raised in Boston and trained at the Walker Art Center, she has served in a variety of foundational roles: as the first curator at Laguna Gloria Art Museum (now The Contemporary Austin); executive director of the Aspen Art Museum and the Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans; Visual Arts Producer for the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta; and in multiple positions—ranging from founding modern and contemporary curator to Deputy Director for Art and Programs to Curator at Large—at the Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas at Austin. Committed to expanding the canon, she has created notable exhibitions (Luis Jiménez, Paul Chan, Michael Smith, Deborah Hay, Negotiating Small TruthsAmerica/AmericasDesire), produced important commissions (Nancy Holt, Siah Armajani, Betye Saar, Vito Acconci, Byron Kim, Teresita Fernández), and acquired major works by a wide range of international artists. Carlozzi has had a long relationship with Artpace, having served as an early advisor, artist interviewer, and program panelist, member of the 1998 artist selection panel and 2001–03 Board of Visitors. In 2015 she curated Immersed from Linda Pace’s art collection, now called Ruby City.

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Dan Cameron

Newport Beach, California

From 2012 to 2015 he was Chief Curator at the Orange County Museum of Art in Newport Beach, California. In 2006, Dan Cameron founded the Biennial Prospect New Orleans, where he worked at until 2011. From 1995 to 2005 he was Senior Curator at the New Museum, New York, where he developed numerous group exhibitions, such as East Village USA and Living inside the Grid, and several individual shows dedicated to the artists Martin Wong, William Kentridge, Carolee Schneemann, Carroll Dunham, Doris Salcedo, José Antonio Hernández Diez, among others.
As independent curator he has organized many exhibitions that brought him international attention, such as El arte y su doble (Fundación Caixa, Madrid, 1987); El jardín salvaje (Fundación Caixa, Barcelona, 1991); Cocido y crudo (Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, 1995), among many others. In 2003, he was the Artistic Director of the 8th Istanbul Biennial, and in 2006, Co-curator of the 5th Taipei Biennial.
He has published hundreds of texts in books, catalogues and magazines, and has given numerous talks and conferences at museums and universities around the world, also carrying out an important teaching activity in New York.

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Hans Ulrich Obrist

London, England

Hans Ulrich-Obrist is the Co-Director of Exhibitions and Programs and Director of International Projects at the Serpentine Gallery in London, positions created for Ulrich-Obrist in April 2006. As a curator at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, France since 2000, among many other exhibitions he organized solo shows with Jonas Mekas (2003), Anri Sala (2004), and Cerith Wyn Evans (2006). Before this position Ulrich-Obrist was an independent curator for a decade, organizing the group show Take Me I’m Yours at the Serpentine (1995) and Retrace Your Steps: Remember at the John Soane Museum (1999), also in London, England. Ulrich-Obrist was a panelist in 1998 for the 1999-2000 year of artists, and was invited to be a speaker at the 2003 symposium, but was unable to come due to illness.
Photo by Dominik Gigler

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