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A conversation between an artist and a gardener in the California border-landscape about creation, change, and loss.
An intertextual, fictionalized narrative weaves together several years of Mexican artist Erick Meyenberg’s observations, research, video recordings, and paintings based on logbooks kept by gardener Chris Shea. Meyenberg’s conversations with Shea about his ephemeral landscape infer the change and loss inherent in human life and propels the deep emotional intelligence of this bilingual book as it reflects on time, creation, and the inspiration of the natural world. Shea’s remarkable, nuanced, and delicate language for color is reflected in Meyenberg’s layered appreciation for the garden Shea tended until the end of his life. Eloisa Haudenschild, Director of inSite, commissioned Meyenberg’s project with Shea for haudenschildGarage in La Jolla, California, and enlisted curator Ruth Estévez, the text’s author.
For more information about the project see the haudenschildGarage website or DoppelHouse.com. Note: This book has two parts, one in English, one in Spanish.
In the rich interplay of the many sources Estévez pulls together, questions are generated that don’t have easy answers. The reader cannot escape the heavy weight of historical representations of gardens, and the significance given to them by observers and toilers alike. .... How do we live more fully in the seasons, the uncertainty, and the revealing? ... A beautiful book.
—"Life and Death in a Garden" by Chris Hoff, OC Art Blog
Ruth Estévez is a curator and writer based in Mexico City and Boston. She is senior curator-at-large at The Rose Art Museum in Boston and co-curator of the 34th São Paolo Biennial. She is the 2019 co-curator of Idiorhythmias, an annual program of performance, music, poetry, and text at the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA). Estévez was director and curator at the Gallery at Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater (REDCAT) in Los Angeles from 2012 to 2018 and chief curator at the Carrillo Gil Art Museum in Mexico City from 2007 to 2012. In 2010, Estévez founded LIGA-Space for Architecture, a nonprofit platform focused on experimentation in architecture, urbanism, and public art.