and another objects in the arts moment

I think I forgot to post news about Ajay Kurian’s show, which opened on November 13 and is still running for a couple more weeks [ADDENDUM: it has now been extended through January 15]. In September I greatly enjoyed my visit to Ajay’s Brooklyn studio.

OPENING SUNDAY

Ajay Kurian
Petrichor
November 13 – December 18, 2011
Opening: Sunday, November 13, 6-8pm

Each of us carry our own history’s trove, unwittingly founding our futures on previous episodes either remembered, forgotten, or removed. The splay of such a treasure accounts for the ground we walk on, the ground that follows our every move. Upon this contingent ground, we live and rustle against the world’s other beings who may regard our lives with less zeal than our own. Quickly zooming out and leaving this world altogether, we find the distant planets, stars, and galaxies, each with their own exquisite oddities, majesty, and terrors. Further still remain those dark corners and passages as yet unexplored and outside our scope. Considered altogether, these are the competing gardens of life. The garden is always an enclosed space, framed or having some border. And with every garden is a gardener. Humanity has monopolized this role, but there is a whole variety of other things that tend to each garden. In the case of a familiar garden, it could be ladybugs chewing away leaves, deers plucking flowers for nourishment, earthworms oxygenating the soil, but we need not limit the garden to those in our backyards or windowsills. Instead, let us imagine all things as both garden and gardener. Let us conceive of the garden as an assemblage of objects that form a strange unity, able to interact and tend to the endless variety of other gardens or objects: Hydrogen gardening oxygen, allowing for life; a historian redressing a past once thought official; a dog looking at his caretaker, understandingly. This is not the neatness of the French garden, nor the forced “naturalness” of the English, but a wider form of gardening that is more foundational than the mere activity of tending to the formation of plants.

Robert Smithson may have found the garden a repulsive place to begin thinking about nature, but that’s perhaps because he began on the wrong foot. The garden isn’t any place to think about nature because there is no nature. Once we delineate nature we have a strange absolute fence that designates the unnatural, the monstrous, the synthetic. Morality bleeds into these cordoned-off zones and colors them with sinister shades. To break the fence is not to infest the good clean world with all these darker creatures, but to give them an equal footing in a world without nature. In such a place, we can be regard all things with the suspended air between care and caution, shining the light of speculation rather than blinding absolutes. The garden as metaphor then becomes unbridled and potently able to provide a new way of considering our reality. Casting aside the hubris of a world governed by man’s intention alone, we slowly begin to see our place within a multiplicity of gardens and gardeners.

So here now are a series of unfolding gardens, loosely devised as those past, present and future, all competing, overlapping, commingling, but with borders nevertheless. From the receding gardens of the Pyrenean ibex, the black rhino, and baiji, to the current, more local garden that includes a place for those on the fringe. Built on a ground that owes its birth to a gardener with a louder voice than my own, the current garden points to what’s to come, what can be expected when we relinquish nature, when it starts to rain on what was once solid, odorless ground.

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Ajay Kurian, born 1984 in Baltimore, has a BA in visual art and art history from Columbia University. He is an artist living in Brooklyn, NY and the founder of Gresham’s Ghost, a curatorial project that has found its home in various locations around New York City. Kurian recently organized a project at The Artist’s Institute, NY, entitled “No More Presence and Robert Filliou”. Last year he organized a show at White Flag Projects, St. Louis, entitled “Which Witch is Which? and/or Summertime”, accompanied by a trio of catalogues designed by Dexter Sinister. His work has been previously exhibited as part of group exhibitions at Rachel Uffner, Harris Lieberman and Gavin Brown, NY. This is his first solo show with the gallery.