STOWE — Seven thousand hand-cut butterflies and black moths lead the viewer into a series of rooms adorned with mixed media presentations of wax, oil pastels, paper cuttings, ink, acrylic paint — a garden brought to life inside the walls of The Current by curator Rachel Moore.
“Artists in this exhibition use the metaphor of a garden to address climate change, decolonization, feminism, societal tensions and our endangered environment,” she wrote in a blurb for the gallery show, “In the Garden,” which runs until April 11.
That metaphor has brought seven artists from different backgrounds to share and indulge in interpretations of paradise, privilege, boundaries and cultivation.
Carlos Amorales is the responsible party for the explosion of lepidoptera that greets you at the door to The Current. Sitting underneath those butterflies and moths, you’ll usually find Kelly Holt, the gallery manager, who welcomes visitors with a smile and wealth of knowledge ready to be shared about the pieces inside the space.
Amorales was born in Mexico City in 1970 and studied art at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. He moved home to Mexico in the early 2000s. Seven short years later his grandmother fell ill. He prepared himself and his children for the journey to her hometown in the country’s north to bid her farewell, and during that visit, he saw for the first time, a crystalline image in his head, “a swarm of black butterflies,” a plague, he recalled during a virtual panel discussion Feb. 5.
And swarm they did, all along the walls of his studio in the midst of creation, and then onward to exhibits across the world, until a flutter of them made its way The Current’s garden-themed exhibit.
One of the pieces in the show is by retired University of Vermont professor and artist Cameron Davis, “Encounter II.” Her work deals with the union of people and nature, using plants from her garden as references and to make imprints in her paint. Inside of the painting, layers of plants pile up in “arrangements and rearrangements resulting in emergent outcomes,” she said in the Feb. 5 panel.
Wylie Garcia lives in Vermont and worked through many mediums before trying the acrylic paint used for their piece in the exhibit, “Through a Space in the Garden Bough, I See Light Over the Horizon,” which captures a lush wall of colorful flora obscuring a distant horizon. The painting features “emotional portals that look beyond, at a landscape inspired by the romanticism in scenic art,” Garcia said at the panel.
Gracia said she drew influence from the Thomas Moran painting “Ulysses and the Sirens” and the poem that inspired it, “The Lotos-eaters” by Alfred Tennyson. The painting aims to probe the distance between the stasis inside those floral walls and the reality that lies beyond them.
Inspired by her children, world events and natural materials, Valerie Hammond’s work in this show takes on a corporeal lens; she “decided that the ferns were very much like the body,” she said at the panel, and her pieces reflect that: She frequently swaps internal body structures like nerves and veins with leaf blades and stems.
Hammond works with ink, paint, silk, paper and wax. The centerpiece of one of the gallery’s rooms, “Murmur,” is a floral sculpture in which a hand emerges from the petals of a flower, encased in wax, an eternal seal.
Accompanying “Murmur” is an image made of pigment on silk called “Harpy,” after the rapacious mythological monster with the wings and talons of a bird and a woman’s head. Except Hammond’s incarnation strikes a pensive pose, the creature softly looking down.
Mary Mattingly makes sculptures — and photographs of them — of ethereal plant scenes. By building her sculptural ecosystems, Mattingly wants to raise questions of equal and equitable access to food, shelter and clean water. Gardens — especially those lying close to riverbeds — brim with fertility in her works.
Her series on display is an exposé in collage, using fish tanks, mirrors, digital collage tools and physical arrangement to evoke distance between the work and viewer — the pieces are set back behind a plane of glass.
Ebony G. Patterson addresses visibility and invisibility in her works. Patterson’s showpiece is called “…there is a rumble as the garden folds, rolls, shreds, devours…itself” — a massive display of collage, digital print on archival watercolor paper, construction paper, plastic and feathers, standing at 96 by 109 by 15 inches behind glass. It took seven people to install the piece, said Holt, the gallery manager, and didn’t fit through the front door of the gallery.
The piece previously appeared in an exhibition at the Speed Museum in Kentucky focused on Breonna Taylor, the Black woman in Louisville shot and killed by police during a botched raid in 2020, inspiring nationwide demonstrations against police violence and recklessness. And while Patterson’s piece doesn’t specifically reference Taylor or her death, it approaches ideas of class, race, gender and violence in postcolonial spaces. The piece is rife with layers, physical and imagined, that draw the viewer in and force them to notice Easter eggs hidden among the hand-cut and torn elements behind the glass.
Paul Anthony Smith, on the other hand, directly addresses the relationship between peace and unrest, exclusion and inclusion, barriers and desires. With paintings depicting layered chain-link fences, keeping the viewer at bay from the lush greenery in the background, Smith evokes a perception of passing by a space you are not to enter.
Each of his four pieces on show in Stowe — all massive prints covered in oil pastel and spray paint — were made when he moved from Jamaica to Florida to New York and for the first time saw the change of seasons. He said the works are inspired by the “perennial of nature coming back to life in the spring.”
Through “noticing where nature is trying to take back its course,” he said in the artist panel, Smith began understanding how boundaries such as concrete and fencing disrupt the natural growth of plants. The works selected for the Vermont show are fragments of a larger series, “Dreams Deferred,” a nod to Langston Hughes famed short poem “Harlem.” For Smith, those human-built boundaries force the natural world to put its aspirations for growth on hold — and restrict people’s access to that world.
The chain-link fences in his paintings block the viewer’s path toward lush background gardens and make for a metaphor about segregation.
Those same questions about barriers came to mind for Moore, the gallery’s curator, as she looked to put it all together. The Current’s mission is to bring access to art, raise awareness to important issues and ask the questions that art begs to be asked.
“(The question), How can we break down these borders and walls, was part of the curatorial exploration as well,” she said during the panel.
Putting together a show on socially sensitive topics is a delicate task. When asked by an artist in the show why Moore had chosen the seven selectees, Moore said: “The curatorial vision was to make work that addresses social, political and environmental topics that concern everyone, artists that are engaged in those conversations and topics.”