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Effective January 1: Masks are Optional in VisArts’ Classrooms and Studios
The original Garden Folly project began as a large-scale digitally designed and printed mural for a multinational consumerist conclave — a mall. This new iteration takes the form of a large-scale collage composed of unique artist-designed prints produced on shower curtains — each curtain acting not only as a visual veil but also as a symbol of privacy, transformation and bodily renewal. The choice of this domestic, intimate surface is rooted in the curator, artist and organizer’s personal history of physical trauma and childhood illness. The curtain becomes a liminal space — part threshold, part shelter, part site of reflection.
Expanding on its original form, Garden Follies (Showers) is now an evolving site of collaboration, inviting artists to reflect on their own histories of trauma, resilience and cultural inheritance. Together, these works form an immersive landscape of memory and critique. Through a mix of digital and physical media, participating artists respond to the legacy of colonial aesthetics, particularly as embodied in the “folly,” a decorative but functionless architectural structure rooted in 18th-century European garden design.
In addition, the pineapple, once a rare and exotic commodity flaunted as a symbol of wealth and imperial reach, is reimagined here not as a token of hospitality but as a loaded icon — an emblem of fetishized consumption, displacement and power. The project uses the ornate language of the Baroque — its grandeur, artifice and theatricality — to evoke both wonder and disquiet.
Garden Follies (Showers) becomes a site of contradiction: ornamental yet critical, playful yet mournful, fractured yet communal. By layering personal and political histories, it exposes the beautiful absurdity of empire and the quieter, enduring work of healing.
Artists: M Aragon, Heloisa Escudero, Frank McCauley, Studio M+ M, and Gabriel Soto
Gabriel Soto’s designs are a mixture of scientific diagrams and images of gods and demons. The works draw from the Greco-Egyptian Magical Papyri, a group of magical texts from the second-century Eastern Mediterranean. These texts were, at the time, seen as cutting-edge magical technology for working within an enchanted, and haunted world. Soto incorporates mechanical grids, schematics, and architectural diagrams to show that we, through our own technologies, navigate the same world that these magicians did but from a different perspective. The symbolic medium of a shower curtain is apt for these images, as both the Greco-Egyptian magical tradition and our techno-cultic world promise the same: the lifting of a veil, the removal of what blurs our sight, and entry into the Garden of Eden—for either good or ill.
Throughout history, the pineapple has stood as an emblem of royalty and opulence—a fruit once treasured for its rarity and excess. In Heloisa Escudero’s work, it becomes something else entirely: a symbol of how human behavior can twist meaning, elevating the fragile and perishable while overlooking the deeper threads that bind us to one another. Escudero reclaims discarded objects—items stripped of their original purpose, misused, or simply abandoned—and breathes into them new forms that speak to the distortions of thought born from anxiety. The “dysfunctional pineapple” is her starting point, a seed from which absurd, abstract, and illogical creations grow.
These pieces are not meant to resolve but to reflect—the way anxiety fractures perception, warps logic, and renders the familiar strange. In this space, the pineapple is no longer sweet; it is a mirror of the restless mind.
M Aragon’s houseplants are not okay. Tropicality is at the center of Aragon’s work in Garden Follies, interrogating narratives and mythmaking traveled from under resourced countries to the imperialist nation of the United States. What is currently known as “tropical houseplants” is an amalgamation of plants forcibly removed from their homes to decorate the households of the European upper class. This design trend, like many post-colonial traditions, continues to live on in suburban America, creating a lucrative economy off “tropical” plants, known for their intricate management. Aragon is interested in the imperfect or even incorrect maintenance of “tropical” plants as a mirror for their own experience as a second generation Central American in the United States.
The Central American experience, like other colonized nation-states, is often seen through limited historical context and categorization. This includes the practice of pottery, the expectation of only being recognized and respected if they maintain the traditional terracotta or barro aesthetics. Aragon is using the methods of handbuilding, recycling mixed clay bodies, and creating unconventional shapes to push and pull the definition of “Central American pottery.”
Situating the nonnative tropical houseplants in nonnative pottery offers an alternative ornamental sculpture in an imaginative landscape.
Studio M + M is a multi media studio that bridges the natural world with the absurdity of modern life. “Daylighting” is the process of uncovering a waterway that was concealed due to human intervention, restoring it to its exposed natural state. This song was created using software synthesizers and field recordings of: streams in Colorado and Maryland and showers by the artists— uncovering hidden moments of water flowing and digital reconstruction.
VisArts’ In(Site) Projects is a transitory gallery, performance space and screening series that offers the community opportunities to experience experimental and unconventional media. Featuring artists working at the intersection of art and technology, these activations unfold in unexpected situations and locations, inviting active looking, deep listening, sociability, lively interaction and unexpected encounters with contemporary art.
LISTEN TO “DAYLIGHTING” Experience this audio soundscape while viewing the exhibition
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