Pittsburgh’s most passionate gardeners glorify nature in art

“The Garden Inside”

Sue Abramson, Christina Labrise, Sherrie Flick, Christina Worsing

… “The Garden Inside”

Sue Abramson, Christina Labrise, Sherrie Flick, Christina Worsing

Pittsburgh Filmmakers

Through Oct. 12

477 Melwood Ave.

(412) 681-5449

As part of Pittsburgh Filmmakers, the Melwood Screening Room’s New Gallery is being filled with work by four female artists, all practicing through different mediums, yet all connected by their common passion for gardening, which is the exhibit’s theme. There is a clear sense of obsession with and connectedness to the botanical world on the part of all of these women. Whether it is expressed through images or through words, foliage is being honored and nurtured. The gallery reinvents itself as a kind of tribute to the lush outside world. It truly is a “garden inside;” the photographs are what Sue Abramson, in the comments she posts beside her prints, describes as a “surrogate space for those times you can’t be in your yard.”

To complement Abramson’s images, Christina Worsing put together books filled with Sherrie Flick’s garden text – a verbal context to embellish the visual. According to Flick, who co-founded The Gist Street Reading Series, “You are a small creature easily fooled into believing the gazing ball in the yard can tell the future if you just give it enough time.” It seems, looking at the pictures, that Abramson does indeed try to tame the natural world, or at least interpret and share her experience of it.

Abramson’s black-and-white prints are of flowers, twigs and vegetables – including a four-print “Brussels Sprouts” series. Christina Labrise’s color images plunge viewers into a distorted, dream-like world. Labrise uses pinhole and toy cameras, consciously skewing scale and perspective. Her choice of technology is reflective of her tendency to surrender power. Just as she rejects the control-filled world of digital technology, Labrise also abandons authority in her own garden, which is entirely self-seeded and wild.

The images that result, with their blurred distortions and contorted scale, seem to imitate the imagined perspective of an insect. The viewer is thrown into the garden, left disoriented, and forced to examine the flowers for the intrinsic value: the color, the shape. This surrender is in stark contrast to the emphasis on taming that Sherrie Flick expresses in her writing. Naturally, it becomes clear that the experience of a garden – the relationship between plants and the gardener who tends to them – can vary greatly from one artist to the next. But regardless of the differences in technique and aesthetic result, the photographs of Labrise and Abramson both exhibit and glorify intimacy with plants.

The sense of communion with nature that blankets this exhibit is probably best articulated by Flick herself: “The world is beautiful and it is yours.”