![\"Linda](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/99-DO5-IMG2-IM_Aloi_Baracco-Wright_04_RoryGardiner1031c_017_b_CMYK_resultat.jpg\")
Grasslands Repair<\/em>, installation view, Pavillon australien, Biennale de Venise, 2018.
Photo : Rory Gardiner, courtesy of Baracco+Wright Architects<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
![\"Linda](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/99-DO5-IMG3-IM_Aloi_Baracco-Wright_12_RoryGardiner1031c_003_v2_CMYK_resultat.jpg\")
Grasslands Repair<\/em>,
installation view, Australian Pavilion,
Venice Biennale, 2018.
Photo : Rory Gardiner, courtesy of Baracco+Wright Architects<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/99-DO5-IMG4-IM_Aloi_Baracco-Wright_09_RoryGardiner1031c_004_v2_b_CMYK_resultat.jpg\")
Grasslands Repair & Skylight<\/em>, installation views, Pavillon australien, Biennale de Venise, 2018.
Photos : Rory Gardiner, courtesy of Baracco+Wright Architects<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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However, Johnson\u2019s conception of plants is unique in the sense that he attributes to them a truly novel and highly plant-focused signification. He sees plants as living organisms in their own right \u2014 organisms that demand our attention. More than other outdoor shrubs or weeds, potted plants are dependent on our care and regular scrutiny. In this sense, plants constitute an invitation to be present, to live in the moment, to be observant, and to care. Botanists and good gardeners know that appropriately tending to plants requires being finely attuned to their unwritten, silent codes. Plant unhappiness manifests on the tips of leaves. To appropriately care for plants, therefore, means to develop an idiosyncratic vocabulary of phyto-signs \u2014 and, in truth, a slightly different vocabulary for each family of plants is sometimes needed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This aspect of Johnson\u2019s plant philosophy is extremely important as it suspends the traditional reliance on the obvious nature\/culture dichotomy, inviting us to think about plants in new ways. How can their specific qualities offer a model for us to think differently about the world? In Johnson\u2019s view, plants invite us to be attentive to the most vulnerable in our communities. They remind us how important it is to see the signs of malaise and unhappiness, especially when those who are suffering do so in silence. Yet, despite the anthropomorphic subtext, Johnson\u2019s plants remain wholly plants \u2014 they still branch off into an ecological dimension in which \u201cto care\u201d also means to care for a non-hierarchical and fluid relationship of naturecultures. As he points out, \u201cThere\u2019s something interesting for me about the man-made object that houses the organic object and that kind of connectivity that they share. One kind of helping the other while the other tries to overcome the first. Plants will always burst through and take over. Nature has a way of claiming things that are foreign to it. We all have to think about how these things are going to survive.\u201d2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 2 <\/a> - Mara Veitch, \u201cArtist Rashid Johnson Isn\u2019t the Plant-Parenting Type\u201d www.interviewmagazine.com\/art\/rashid-johnson-hauser-and-wirth-exhibition-the-hikers<\/a>. .<\/span>“<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Plants timidly infiltrated Johnson\u2019s work in 2009 in the installation Smoke and Mirrors<\/em> and quickly became the protagonists of a series of installations informed by Sol LeWitt\u2019s 1980 photobook Autobiography<\/em>. On each page of LeWitt\u2019s book, a grid of nine square black-and-white images documents his studio on Hester Street, in Manhattan, where he lived and worked for twenty years. In his installations, including Plateaus<\/em> (2014), Antoine\u2019s Organ<\/em> (2016), Within Our Gates<\/em> (2017), and Monument<\/em> (2018), Johnson reconfigures LeWitt\u2019s preoccupations with architectural space, objects, nature, and identity in new and inventive ways by appropriating LeWitt\u2019s modular grid (also central to his three-dimensional work) as a flattened, geometricized, and ordered emblem of modernity. The grid, a historical framework of knowledge, firmly anchors Johnson\u2019s experience of space, body, and object in an unstable present \u2014 a critical milieu healthily skeptical of past conceptions of nature, architecture, and representation. Johnson\u2019s notion of the biographical starts here, with the unavoidable desire to make sense of a present that can never be free of a complex past defined by multiple intersecting texts and unpredictable cross-cultural narratives.
Books, rugs, monitors, chairs, fluorescent lights, and roughly sculpted busts made of shea butter are among the objects sharing the exhibition space with a myriad of potted plants \u2014 palms, bananas, ferns, spider plants, dracaenas. Perhaps not coincidentally, a page in LeWitt\u2019s book is entirely dedicated to the plants in his studio. But Johnson\u2019s plants also emerged from a different background. The association between plants and architectural structures piqued his interest while he was on a trip to the Turks and Caicos Islands, where he saw the empty, grid-like structures of derelict mid-construction buildings overrun by local vegetation. This visually striking combination led Johnson to think of a material and conceptual fluidity between categories. He thus began to refer to his installations as \u201cbrain-models\u201d \u2014 places in which ideas form, are alive, morph, and are in constant flux. They are opportunities through which historical fictions can be constructed, broken down, and reconfigured.
This fluidity unravels as one explores the installations. It soon appears clear that plants are not only present as living beings but also exist in the pages of the many books dotting the space, as well as in the shea butter sculptures and black soap shavings harboured across the grid. Shea butter is extracted from the nut of the African shea tree, and black soap is derived from the ash of locally harvested plants and barks such as plantain, cocoa pods, palm tree leaves, and shea tree bark. Like fat and felt in the work of Joseph Beuys, these materials have become mythical signifiers in Johnson\u2019s narratives. Originally West African medicinal and healing plant-derived substances, both are now staples in beauty products worldwide. To Johnson, shea butter and black soap bridge his personal experience as a child growing up in the suburbs of Chicago to a desire to connect with an abstract and constructed idea of Africanness embodied in the natural origin of plants and their roots \u2014 an important reminder of the practical and metaphorical roles that plants play in identity construction.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/99-DO5-IMG1-IM_Aloi_Johnson_JOHNSON-RASHID-6_v2_CMYK_resultat.jpg\")
Within Our Gates<\/em>, detail and installation view, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscou, 2016.
Photos : Alexey Naroditsky, courtesy of the artist & Hauser & Wirth, New York<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/99-DO5-IMG5-IM_Aloi_Johnson_JOHNSON-RASHID-6_CMYK_resultat.jpg\")
Smoke & Mirrors<\/em>, installation view, The Sculpture Center, Long Island City, 2009.
Photo : Jason Mandella, courtesy of the artist & Hauser & Wirth, New York<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Rashid](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/99-DO5-IMG7-IM_Aloi_Johnson_EXH113532-JOHNR92064-3_CMYK_resultat.jpg\")
Monument<\/em>, installation view, Institute for Contemporary Art at VCU, Richmond, 2018.
Photo : David Hunter Hale, permission de | courtesy of the artist & Hauser & Wirth, New York<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/99-DO5-IMG6-IM_Aloi_Johnson_JOHNR65119_CMYK_resultat.jpg\")
Plateaus<\/em>, installation view, David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles, 2014.
Photo : Fredrik Nilsen, courtesy of the artist, David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles & Hauser & Wirth, New York<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
Dried and processed plant matter, pressed in the form of book pages, also becomes the repository of cultural expressions \u2014 the crystallization and memorialization of social and personal narratives inviting visitors to become co-authors. It is in this non-hierarchical context that plants are cast as pervasive cultural makers and facilitators. Like Steichen\u2019s delphiniums, they carry no religious or classical symbolism; they don\u2019t speak through past rhetorical tropes. Like Oiticica\u2019s potted varieties, Johnson\u2019s plants occupy the gallery space with a political will to resist past, and very white, cultural tropes and institutional powers. They deliberately complicate object relations in art by offsetting the rectilinearity of the modular grid with the organic matter of leaves and stalks. Their living presence inserts the active possibility of growth in the work, alluding to cultivation (cultural as well as botanical) in the context of an otherwise crystallized and static set of cultural relationships. In this context, Johnson\u2019s plants have become a creative engine, and as they do in Baracco+Wright and Tegg\u2019s installation Repair, they uncunningly stand in for human communities. As Johnson states, \u201cThe plants are all from different places \u2014 cactus, palms, all these disparate plants from different places living together here. It\u2019s almost a metaphor for the collective us1<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 1 <\/a> - Anne Strainchamps, \u201cRace, Yearning And Escape In The Shelves Of Antoine\u2019s Organ,\u201d www.wpr.org\/race-yearning-and-escape-shelves-antoines-organ<\/a>. .<\/span>“<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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