Test Plot(s)

A test plot is a living laboratory: a piece of land designated for experimental research; a space that connects the individual studying it with the living organisms and environmental factors that surround all of us, such as air, water, sunlight, and soil. Test plots can be any size—a square foot, a square acre, or larger. Commonly used by ecologists, agronomists, and landscape architects, this research approach has been adopted as a way to frame the unique working methods of the five artists in this exhibition.

Before crossing the threshold into BMAC’s East Gallery, we are first mesmerized by a range of lush chromatic greens scattered across the wall. Inside, green appears in the tattered shirts of Minga Opazo’s living fungi sculpture, Miles Huston’s collected plastic containers, the silk leaves on Rachel Youn’s artificial plants, Bronson Smillie’s biomorphic forms on paper, and Esteban Ramon Perez’s assemblage of gardening gloves and leather scraps. Why so much green? On a superficial level, green is the color most often associated with nature. It has also become increasingly synonymous with companies trying to appear more eco-friendly or sustainable. Yet green’s symbolism goes beyond these tropes to include ideas of rebirth, toxicity, and prosperity.

Initially playful in form and color, the artworks in Test Plot(s) reveal a paradox: a fascination with the organic matter that makes up our world, juxtaposed with the mass-produced, synthetic materials that are slowly endangering it. Ramon Perez’s assemblages, for example, are built predominantly with leather scraps. The lifecycle of leather begins with a living animal, continues as a hide, and becomes leather after a series of tannin baths. Traces of these processes linger in the surfaces Ramon Perez constructs from discarded scraps, which include gloves from gardeners across Los Angeles. The scraps are stitched, layered, painted, and often abraded, leaving subtle marks of labor and reuse. The work gestures toward the region’s often overlooked stewards, tracing an idiosyncratic network of labor that quietly shapes its residential green spaces.

Smillie’s industrial chart-paper drawings are displayed staggered on the wall. Instead of using the paper to document fluctuations in water flow over an hour, day, or week as originally intended, Bronson depicts a series of repetitive, curvilinear, and bulbous shapes. Temporality is central to the chart paper on which these drawings have been created, but what kind of stimuli could Smillie’s forms be responding to? Perhaps the irregular fluctuations in sunlight and precipitation just outside the walls of the museum, or the movements of the various man-made and organic materials in the room itself. The abstracted charts evade any direct interpretation, but we can revel in our attempts to decode them.

Huston’s sculpture, on the other hand, displays an assortment of industrially produced plastic watering canisters. Like a cabinet of curiosities, the galvanized steel shelves act as a repository for objects that have been hand-picked and collected by Huston over the last decade. Unobstructed by glass, the canisters are free to be closely scrutinized for how distinct and neatly organized they are. But are they arranged by scientific categories? By color? Perhaps they symbolize our collective anxiety around the cheap and mass-produced plastic that has not only spread so potently across the planet, but also into our bodies.

While all of the artworks on display bear the imprint of man-made products, they also reveal gestures of reclamation, both subtle and overt. Opazo’s living fungi sculpture demonstrates that we need not be paralyzed in an increasingly polluted world. Displayed within a vitrine, Opazo’s diligently grown mushroom spores and layers of colorful clothing scraps are undergoing a transformational process, breaking down toxic textile waste and transforming it into soil. By harnessing the decomposition power of mushrooms, Opazo proposes a solution in collaboration with nature.

In a similar vein, Rachel Youn presents the illusion of a thriving hybrid organism that has grafted itself onto an abandoned piece of machinery. By repurposing a shiatsu massager, Youn cleverly breathes life into tall, blooming artificial flowers. The unending movement of the jerry-rigged stems echoes phototropism, in which plants move towards and away from sunlight for photosynthesis and growth. The artificial flowers’ Sisyphean search for light without end insinuates that nature will persevere even if it must merge with discarded industrial objects—an apt metaphor for laboring bodies, human and non-human alike.

The artworks in Test Plot(s) display an ongoing dialogue with nature, which range from deeply personal and symbolic to technological and scientifically driven. The specificity of materials used by Huston, Opazo, Ramon Perez, Smillie, and Youn reflect a concern with our relationship to waste remediation, the duality between the natural and artificial, and the labor required to either control or preserve nature.

By embracing BMAC’s East Gallery as a test plot, we can begin imagining new ways in which organic, non-living, and industrially refined materials can thrive in symbiosis rather than compete for resources.

— José Chavez-Verduzco, curator

ARTISTS IN THE EXHIBITION

Miles Huston, Minga Opazo, Esteban Ramon Perez, Bronson Smillie, Rachel Youn

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