Manmade

Excerpt from Essay by Daneva H. Dansby

Plastic, man’s synthetic solution to the natural, is to find its way into the landscape work of Jennifer Vanderpool. Jennifer’s outdoor installation piece, created for “Manmade” draws upon the artist’s past works, engaging a creative fantasy akin to the experience of an iced cake exploding in the kitchen, that amasses in a kaleidoscopic spray of color, wax, rocks, shimmering bits of plastic flowers and dangling prisms twinkling in the trees. Placed beyond the gallery walls, Jennifer’s piece further illustrates the distinction between the manmade environment of ‘art’ and the ‘natural’ world outside. Yet the work’s displacement also further stresses its distinction from the natural, as Jennifer’s fantastical landscape draws attention to its very own construction separating itself from the ‘real’ trees, the ‘real’ grass and as such the ‘real’ beauty of nature. Growth and decomposition are paralleled in Jennifer’s aesthetic form as the wax melts into the landscape paralleling the relationship of nature’s own ineffability to the passing of time and change—all things must die (except, perhaps, those things made of plastic). Moreover, the fantasy further highlights man’s ‘othering’ of the outside world, nature is built and constructed into a vision of our own imagined playground.