Daneva H. Dansby
Jennifer Vanderpool: Pocket Full of Posies
On view at One Colorado, Pasadena, CA, August – October 15th, 2009

Walking into an installation piece by Jennifer Vanderpool is like moving into the center of a kaleidoscope. Every which way the head turns technicolor prisms of color greet the eye, like shiny baubles caught in the sight of a circling bird mesmerized from above. Recycled tufts of turf and fabric bloom into pompomed flowers, sprays of iridescent paint fan into petals of paper and layered verandahs of bricolage. Yet peer closely enough (and you will want to) a tiny bird from above has become entangled in a maze of rooting wire, for what entices, also so frequently ensnares. Vanderpool’s “Pocket Full of Posies” on view at One Colorado in Pasadena, CA until October 15th, 2009 continues on the path of her past works, leading the audience, and artist, into a myriad spectacle that explores the tension between the tantalizingly sweet and the repugnancy of the amassing compost, the idealized domestic realm of woman under the scrutiny of the public eye, and the parallel realms of art as fetish, inspiration, and commodity.

Vanderpool’s three-month long Artist Studio Residency at One Colorado, is the first in a pilot venture between the Armory Center for the Arts and this Pasadena-area shopping complex. Envisioned as a space where the public may take part in a “rare opportunity . . . [to be] . . . both witness and share in the lifestyle of a contemporary artist” (Press Release, 08/09) Vanderpool’s work in progress is both a point of departure for the artist to move into the larger community, as well as an example of ingenuity wrought during difficult economic times. Contemporary artists, long-since engaged in the discursive nuances of the museum and gallery space, and so typically residents themselves of the more inexpensive areas of town, are now frequent tenants in the expanding vacancies throughout our cities’ cores. Once bustling causeways are now scattered with ‘For Lease’ signs and the perfect solution seems to marry these ‘Empty Spaces’ with the temporal, artist-spaces, appearing as apparitions in store fronts around the country. No longer living up to their primary functions, empty shops are turned into transitional gallery spaces enticing the public back into their fold. As one shopper, happening upon Vanderpool’s room of wonders was to exclaim “How beautiful!” this relationship may be one worth considering for long-term cultivation, economic downturn or not.

That Vanderpool’s work finds home in almost any environment is a testament to her artistic vision where recycling from one form into the next is the method as well as the intent. While all artwork is an act of creation, Vanderpool’s distinct oeuvre of pastel sweetness, her shimmering palette, and intimate layering of materials has the distinct flavor of cooking, as if by adding to each medium, the resulting concoction will be a delicate recipe of delights. It is no coincidence that the final garden so often resembles a culinary explosion. All the ‘girlishness’ of modern domesticity, the pink, ‘sugar and spice of all things nice’ of the idealized feminine like a cake layered in frosting and elaborate decoration so saccharine that to take more than one bite would make one sick. Vanderpool’s garden landscapes seem to interrogate the very notion of the female, the ‘garden’ itself a taming and ordering of ‘wild vegetation’. The pleasure of entering Vanderpool’s garden paradises elicits an immediate attraction, a compulsion to look, and continue looking, to try and make sense of what is almost a sensory overload, of color, sound, and movement. Yet within this harmonious setting there is also a cacophony of textures, bits and pieces of assemblage, and an overflowing of parts: beads, swivel sticks, cardboard remnants, paper flowers, textile swatches, mesh, yarn, plastic bags, wax and oozing glue. The visceral becomes viral, like the sap seeping from the trunk of a diseased tree, so fascinating that one wants to touch even while repulsed. Vanderpool’s feminine is a Disneyesque-fantasy, an incongruous pleasure, where the fairy-tale princess’ closet of clothes erupts into a psychedelic peacock plume.

The visiting public to “Pocket Full of Posies” is not left to their own devices to simply enjoy this fantastical setting but instead area asked to take part in the cultivation of Vanderpool’s intricate display. Visitors are “encouraged to become involved in the creative process. . . [and] to create a flower from the selection of available recycled materials. Flowers may be planted in the community section of the garden or taken home as a remembrance” (Press release, 08/09). With the artist’s studio open to the public during normal shopping hours, some of the mystique so often surrounding the artistic process seems to disappear (for better or for worse): the artist as much of a curio as the artwork on display. If the audience is to wonder of their role in this theatrical staging, as participant and observer, will they see that the spectacle is both a parade of amusements as well as a masquerade disguising that which lies beneath? For ultimately, the children’s game retains its innocent comradery even when everyone has fallen down.

If there is something disquieting about Vanderpool’s work it bubbles to the surface in spite of her playfulness and obvious skill lent to tending the creation of her garden landscapes. Her impressionistic settings pay homage to the complexities of nature’s design, and yet with roots in Art Povera’s recovering and aestheticizing of discarded materials, her environments question the futility of doing such as we stand at the cross-roads of environmental devastation. Vanderpool’s carefully reconstructed flowers and metamorphosing creatures emphasize the fleeting reality of nature, plastic and other man-made throw outs, made beautiful in this make-believe replication of a community garden. Suspend your disbelief for a moment, enter into the paradise, even take home a posy for remembrance, but also don’t forget that this is not real. Vanderpool’s underlying allegiances to environmental preservation are further apparent when viewed against inspirations such as the work of outside-artist Howard Finster. While Finster’s “Paradise Garden”, a garden park museum in Trion, Georgia and curio-home to over 46,000 art objects, paid reverence to his evangelic roots, his self-contained environments submerged the visitor in other-world environments intended to evoke a complete experience, for Finster transcendence into possibilities of enlightenment. It is on this point that Vanderpool offers a moment of repose that is so often missing from installations of trash art, frequently chaotic and pointing to their vacuous origins in our throw-away society, Vanderpool instead creates an illustrative narrative, an alternative landscape of beauty recovered from the plastic trinkets of our mass culture. From the compost heap a flower actually blooms.

Vanderpool’s installation finds a strange complement in the shop fronts of a public shopping center. What better place to reincarnate the throw-away items of mass culture into artwork then in the display windows of a fashionable mall. There is an unexpected honesty revealed in the simple relationship drawn here between art’s value, both altruistic and monetary, perhaps not quite the same as purchasing a new pair of jeans from the Gap (thankfully) but at least the possibility of salvation that an artistic vision suggests. Perhaps the irony lies in the economic downturn itself without which I suspect a great deal of good art would never have found a window for a larger viewing public. Like so many things it seems to take a crisis for change to take a hold, now perhaps the next step is to turn some of the empty shop fronts into real public gardens.