HOTHOUSE
Tanya Brodsky, Mary Helena Clark, Sophie Friedman-Pappas, Katie Grinnan
Jason Gomez, Naotaka Hiro, Andrés Monzón-Aguirre, Jeffrey Stuker
February 7- March 15, 2025
In the Fall of 2024 Jedediah Caesar, Director of the Madigan Gallery at CSU Bakersfield, invited the artist Jason Gomez to be the Department of Art's 2024/2025 Artist-in-Residence. Gomez collaborated with the universities Biology department, to build a digital archive of his collection of rare orchids for his exhibition, Novelty Breeding, which filled two sites on campus.
In greenhouse (west) on campus, the contents of Gomez's greenhouse were transposed en masse, where they remain, sustained by the mechanical, climate-controlled environment, patiently waiting for their human pollinator to arrive. In the gallery three distinct but interrelated cartographic works were installed; serially reproduced porcelain pottery, non-photographic images from a Scanning Electron Microscope, and three-dimensional printed representations of orchid flowers.
For Hothouse Caesar and Gomez have invited another group of artists to install their works in the gallery space around, through, and on top of Gomez's previous exhibition. Works by Tanya Brodsky, Mary Helena Clark, Sophie Friedman-Pappas, Katie Grinann, Naotaka Hiro, Andrés Monzón-Aguirre and Jeffrey Stucker extend the previous exhibitions exploration of transience in form and multi-species symbiotic play. The hothouse has been infested with hummingbirds, cephalopods and caterpillars, mnemonic spirits and burnt offerings; hybrid creatures of plant, mineral and animal (including the human animal) in chimeric form.
Hothouse has a number of meanings, among them as an architecture for rearing plants out of season or in hostile environments, and of an extreme concentration of creative forces producing a frenetic overabundance, artists likened to botanical specimens. Both definitions imply a push against the bounds of nature, with implications of beneficent production or the propagation of monstrous beings, depending on your point of view. The works in this exhibition are neither celebrations of or warnings against this fraught program for exceeding our constraints. Rather they embody questions of what it is to live in a time in which the Hothouse has become the rule rather than the exception.
PUBLIC EXHIBITION PROGRAMING
February 13, 5:30 pm
Visiting Artist Lecture Series: Naotaka Hiro
March 13, 5:30 pm
Visiting Artist Lecture Series: Mary Helena Clark
April 24, 5:30 pm
Visiting Artist Lecture Series: Sophie Friedman-Pappas