The Secret Life of Plants draws its inspiration from a verse by Pablo Neruda in which plants are taken as metaphorical messengers carrying the “hidden flowers” of profound human emotions and intimate.Through a dialogue among a diverse body of works that span the disciplines of painting, photography, performance art, sculpture, video installation and mixed media approaches, the show explores the way in which the natural world— exemplified metonymically through plants —comes to be invested with profound personal,
Social and cultural significance. Occupying the luminal space between inanimate object and possibly sentient life form,that Both feeds human life and provides the air we breathe, plants offer a powerful, affective site of mystery in which the imagination can take root and blossom.
Through various, sometimes anthropomorphosized, fantastical and anthropological imaginings offered by works from India, China, & Iran, we can see the ways—both common and disparate—in which we meditate on and metaphorically envision myriad aspects of the
Human condition through this metaphorical vehicle. Hints of science fiction, utopian eamings, Dystopian nightmares, allegorical visual Tales and implicit illusions and references, can be seen through this variegated body works, which tell us as much about
Ourselves in relation to our world, and our imagination, as they do about the playful surface subject—the secret life of plants.
