Dreaming Gardens

June 10 – August 22, 2014

Image: Mary Kocol, The Photographer’s Garden on August 2,
digital inkjet photograph, 23 x 34.5 inches, 2011.
Courtesy of the artist and Gallery NAGA, Boston.

Dreaming Gardens

June 10 – August 22, 2014

Opening Event: Thursday, June 12
5:00 – 7:00p.m.

Gallery talk: Gardens of the Mind, Patrick Chassé, 5:00p.m.
Reception to follow

The many great gardens of the world, of literature and poetry, of painting and music, of religion and architecture, all make the point as clear as possible: The soul cannot thrive in the absence of a garden. If you don’t want paradise, you are not human; and if you are not human, you don’t have a soul.
Thomas More

A garden brings many things to mind, even for urban dwellers – a longing perhaps for Eden, a perfect enclosed space, a divine garden.

The artists in the exhibit all have a profound relationship to gardens; many of them are practitioners in the yard as well as in the studio.  The works range from drawings to installation, knitted sculpture, photography and video.  Many metaphors are expressed when thinking about the idea of the garden: a place of beauty, a sacred space, of contemplation and refuge. These ideas continue to pervade the work of contemporary artists, writers, designers and gardeners themselves, as they have for centuries.

 FEATURED ARTISTS:

Meg Alexander
Avy Claire
Beth Galston
Barbara Gallucci
Mary Kocol
Barbara Moody
Ann Wessmann
Melita Westerlund

Related Program:

Gallery Talk: Gardens of the Mind Lecture by Patrick Chassé, 5:00p.m.

Patrick Chassé is an educator, landscape architect, ecologist, writer, and landscape historian. He is particularly interested in the connections between art and gardens and the evolution of both expressions within a given cultural period. As former Curator of Landscape at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, he sought to explore and compare prominent examples of gardens designed by artists and art made by gardeners.

Gardens of the Mind traces some of these progressions.