Audio recording

Adjacent to Dokoupil’s Untitled #4, two large illustrations of exotic orchid-like flowers hang in a diptych by Miron Schmückle titled Im Garten des Priapus, and in front of it, a vitrine displays the porcelain sculpture At the Edge of Dawn and Darkness by Rachel Kneebone. Both works, while impersonating nature, exaggerate and distort their respective subject matter of botanical illustrations and classical sculpture. Melting, twisting, morphing, the organic curves of human, animal, and plant forms invite intricate exploration of the new, fantastical worlds produced by both Kneebone and Schmückle.

Im Garten des Priapus translates to  In the Garden of Priapus, who is a minor rustic fertility god in Greek mythology, known as protector of livestock, fruit plants, gardens, and male sexuality. Pairing his delicate drawings with German and Latin titles, Schmückle creates the allusion of Victorian era scientific documentation. Hidden behind apparent botanical illustrations, the beauty of nature presents itself in its most isolated state on paper, only to discover through observation that the plant-like elements depicted are fruit of the artist’s imagination. Growing up in Romania under Dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, as a child, Schmückle dreamed of other worlds that seemed forever inaccessible from behind to the Iron Curtain, which sealed off central and eastern European allies of the Soviet Union from open contact with most of the western world. Evoking visions of exotic primaeval forest and jungle flora, he blends seemingly organic and anatomical forms to create outlandish, artificial life with flowers that don’t belong to the Earth. Schmückle describes his biomorphic florals as allegories of the senses, and likens his process to the Surrealist practice of automatic writing. His precise observation of nature and exuberant imagination are fused through a flow-of-consciousness approach. Through this process, Schmückle oscillates between finely painted hyperrealism and disguised escapism that dramatize the vivid colors and shapes of extraordinary flowers rendered overgrown in graphite and India inks.

In Kneebone’s At the Edge of Dawn and Darkness, fragmented human forms mash and melt together in the round with complex and contradictory directionality creating tension between form and fracture. Spherical shapes are distorted, cracked, and collapsed by bodily tendons, torsos, and limbs, as if the offer of a whole, complete form was being continually undermined. Kneebone’s sculptures operate in a near-subliminal space, oscillating and blurring the boundaries between the conscious and the subconscious, the real and the imagined, everything and nothing. Sculpted in porcelain, the material properties of her work further heighten and convey an awareness of opposing states, appearing to be not only heavy, solid, and strong but also light, fragmentary and soft. The eye registers the multitude of twisting dissolving forms as ever-changing configurations, creating a sense of constant flux between micro and macro.

When discussing the role of metamorphosis and the human form in her work, Kneebone stated:

“My interest in addressing the human condition is generally centered on the body – how it feels to be alive. It is the visceral experience of living while acknowledging the failure of language to ‘universally’ narrate what it is to be alive and all that comes with it, that I question. Metamorphosis, to me, belongs in this realm of ambiguity, outside of definite classification to decode our experience of living. As [French Psychoanalyst Jacques] Lacan said, ‘thought is an enterprise of enslavement’. Life is freer than this, sometimes beyond ‘reason or reasoning’, and the pursuit to lock it down is inadequate, lacking, and in a sense, futile.”