Understorey Amanda Johnson and Michele Burder
Exhibitions
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Geelong VIC 3220
Fax: 035221 6441
Email: geelart@geelonggallery.org.au
It is nearly two hundred and forty years since the first colonial botanists encountered indigenous ecologies and European botanical garden templates were imposed across the state.
This exhibition of paintings and drawings by Michele Burder and Amanda Johnson questions the fate of the regional Victorian botanical gardens in a context of global warming and extended drought.
How has our physical and cultural encounter with the public garden changed? Has the picturesque garden subject (as landscape vista, folly, or symbol of civic confidence) become an expression of cultural nostalgia as environmental problems take their toll on public gardens?
Amanda Johnson paints images of 'supported exotics' and extinct or threatened plants such as the recently rediscovered Dwarf Spider Orchid (Caladenia pumila). Her illusionistic 'paper documents' on canvas are replete with watermarks and foxing mould copied from deteriorated botanical documentations. Johnson's painterly parodies of 'first contact' drawings and nineteenth-century garden designs suggest the melancholy possibility of last contact, while luridly modified Victorian garden plans (after William Guilfoyle and others) are a futuristic revisiting of the botanical archive.
Michele Burder's anti-picturesque images include rubbish fragments and organic detritus, items that are not considered part of any idealised botanical garden schema. Burder cleverly re-documents garden sites and the impact of usage. A furry tennis ball fragment is juxtaposed with a fragment of a pine cone. These objects are formally tagged, in a parody of museum labelling.
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