Bumper Crop

carrie R, Estefania Velez Rodriguez, and Rachel Yanku

Curated by Matt Logsdon

September 22 – October 20, 2024

In honor of the autumnal equinox, we have brought together three artists around the theme of the garden. Bumper Crop features carrie R, Estefania Velez Rodriguez, and Rachel Yanku, each with a distinctive practice spanning painting, assemblage, and sculpture.

The history of artists and gardens is long and rich, ranging from the plot on Virginia Woolf’s country home to the window box of German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans. Artists have often found the garden a fountain of inspiration, a guide offering lessons of time and attention, as well as a source of solace. Woolf found all of these in her garden and more, writing:

“The point of Monk’s House is the garden. I shan’t tell you, for you must come and sit there on the lawn with me, or stroll in the apple orchard, or pick – there are cherries, plums, pears, figs, together with all the vegetables. This is going to be the pride of our hearts I warn you.”

Sometimes the garden finds us. Tillmans unexpectedly inherited his first garden, a small window box overgrown with weeds, left behind by previous occupants of a London flat he moved to in 1998. He planted some acorns he collected in Italy, which brought forth tree saplings the next year. He went on to photograph this garden over the next three years, finding it to be such a generous subject he now owns a plot of wild, urban land in Berlin.

For Yanku and her abstract assemblage works, the garden is her studio, where wood gathered from surrounding streets of Bushwick comes together in arrangements referencing fragments of agricultural structures, urban textures, and abstract paintings. Often portions of previous works —“hearts,” she calls them— are recycled as points of germination for new works, much as the farmer uses the remains of a harvested crop to prepare the bed for the following season. Plumb is a narrow piece, constructed of thin strips of wood painted in earth tones of green, brown, and copper, streaking upward against the wall over seven feet high. Like a “zip” from a Barnett Newman painting, it bisects the gallery space, creating both a division and a median. Yanku’s work is the fence around the garden, covered in twining vines of morning glories, a collision of rural and urban, past and future, human and creature.

The most arresting characteristic of carrie R’s sculptures are the limbs sprouting outward from a central meeting point. One can’t help but feel R’s wall sculpture splaying outer body lurching alive in the mind (or gut), while bolted sits, nestled in the corner as if hibernating, its leg-like forms cascading down like stilts, suggesting it could crawl at any moment. The vibration of colors from embedded and blended pigments, and rough applications of oil add to the sense of movement. Whether plant, animal, or alien, R’s sculptures bear qualities of the living and tap into the primal fear of things beyond our control, namely dying. Death is always happening in the garden; a visitor from afar bores a hole through the tomatoes, a mysterious blight withers the zucchini, a praying mantis disembowels a bumble bee. It recalls the English artist Derek Jarman, who left London in 1989 after his HIV diagnosis, to live on the quiet shores of Kent and plant a garden. Modern Nature is a collection of his writing during this grieving, healing, and creative time, where he writes:

“The gardener digs in another time, without past or future, beginning or end. A time that does not cleave the day with rush hours, lunch breaks, the last bus home. As you walk in the garden you pass into this time – the moment of entering can never be remembered. Around you the landscape lies transfigured. Here is the Amen beyond the prayer.”

Estefania Velez Rodriguez uses the symbolic language of painting as a bridge between disparate cultures and spaces. The ambiguous shapes inhabiting her paintings suggest something familiar, yet indescribable, like a distant memory. In Untitled (red and orange plants) the curving forms of oranges, pinks, and reds suggest flower petals and blossoms, jumping to life against the gridded green and blue backdrop. Corriente transports us through the blurred and blended shapes that reminds us of a landscape we both know but can’t define. Rodriguez began the work Corriente while at the Ucross residency in Wyoming, shortly after her residency at Hidrante in her native Puerto Rico, and completed the work in her Brooklyn studio. The luminous greens and deep blues form a luscious merger of all three places to nowhere at all. 

Near the autumnal equinox, the full Harvest Moon rises around sunset, providing farmers with just enough extra light to finish their work before the killing frosts set in. These artists and their works have brought us here together to harvest, transforming our field into a garden of abundance. 

ARTIST BIOS

carrie R (b. 1990, New Jersey) is a Philadelphia-based artist working in the mediums of sculpture and drawing. carrie received her BFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University where she received a James O. Dumont Travel Grant Award. She has exhibited recently with Good Mother Gallery (Los Angeles), Cherry Street Pier at Delaware River Waterfront (Philadelphia), The Clay Studio (Phil.), 5-50 Gallery (NYC), Commonweal (Phil.), and Blah Blah Gallery (Phil.), as well as Below Grand (NYC) and Paradice Palase. She participated in the 2023 SPRING/BREAK Art Fair with 5-50 Gallery, and her work has been featured in Mister Magazine, Suboart Magazine, Munchies Art Club Magazine, and O FLUXO.

Estefanía Vélez Rodríguez (b. 1985, Mayagüez, PR) is a Puerto Rican artist who lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Estefania received her MFA in Painting from Brooklyn College in 2017. She is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Pratt Institute, as well as an Adjunct Professor at Rutgers University (Newark), Brooklyn College, and Montclair State University. Some notable exhibitions include: Praxis Gallery (NYC), Underdonk (NYC), Fordham University (NYC), Below Grand (NYC), Soil Gallery (Seattle), University of Arkansas (AK), Auxiliary Projects (NYC), Cunsthaus (Tampa), Vermont Studio Center (VT), and Art Fair Miami (FL). Her work has been published with The Brooklyn Rail (NY), Artnet (NY), Centro Puerto Rico (NYC and PR), and Revista Marvin in Mexico City (CDMX). She has participated in residencies with Vermont Studio Center (VT), Goldey House (NY), Hidrante (PR), and UCROSS (WY). She has been interviewed by podcasts Art As Form, and Tom Ray. She has a public mural project with the Arts and Cultural Grant of New York and Norte Maar organization (2022), and is a recipient of a NYFA artist grant (2020).

Rachel Yanku lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She makes wooden sculptures that focus on abstraction and assemblage. Her practice is influenced by her background studying dance at Bennington College as well as her time working as a groundskeeper at a botanical garden in New Jersey. In 2021 she started a pop up series called “ART SHOW.” Every few months she hosts group shows in her apartment and friends’ backyards. Her project centers the artist’s current interests as well as community. Yanku’s curation is expanding to Wisconsin this fall; her first project in a gallery space at The Real Tinsel Gallery. Her first solo show was at Evil Twins Gallery in Wisconsin (2023), and has been featured in group shows with Popgun Gallery, Outlet Manhattan, Bullet Space, NADA, and is thrilled to be included in Field of Play’s program.