Aaron Collier: What the Garden Sings

What the Garden Sings

is perceptible to the rapt ear, eye, nose, and skin, unbeholden but available to explanation. The empirical data of the garden does not slow its gait to allow interpretation to keep pace; the pulse, stammer, and buzz is an unrelenting design upon the body that does its best to seize, absorb, simplify. “What to make of it all?” is the cry of the brain before the breeze. The urge to construe is humbled before the Bursting Heart, Beautyberry, Winecup. The complex multivalency of the garden resists reduction, or better said, can only be reduced.

Metaphor is heaped upon the garden, cast upon the cliff, divvied among the ruins. Artists have historically appealed to adjective, analogy, comparison before the multifariousness of nature, doubly aware of form and meaning yet profoundly unsure of the registration between them. The paintings of this exhibition do not call for but participate in the hushed reverence before the complexities of the natural world like the darkened cave, night bloom, or pond surface. Abstraction, congruent with the natural order in being both suggestive and silent, proves fit for the translation of the terrestrial. The simultaneous revelation and concealment in the painting parallels an evolving and shifting world where we what can see, name, or know shares an edge with what we cannot. What is our posture before the familiar and incomprehensible?