Upon entering the stunning new group show at Night Gallery, one of my first thoughts was: Why is it called Shrubs? A shrub conjured in my mind a certain nondescript, low-growing bush — nothing memorable and certainly nothing to write home about. But after walking through the galleries twice, I realized just how aptly and brilliantly the show was named; shrubs encompass an impressive breadth of earthly flora characterized by their resilience and diversity. As a title, Shrubs connotes a certain manifold spirit and quotidian quality captured perfectly across geographies and mediums by the 37 contemporary artists in the show, all of whom intimately explore human relationships with the natural world.

There is nothing new about art that reacts to nature, but Shrubs somehow introduces a groundbreaking approach by coalescing an array of inventive artists working in sculpture, photography, landscape painting, still-lifes, and more. Each work is breathtaking in its own right and deeply personal to its creator yet contributes deftly to an overarching contemplation of how nature exists both in opposition and in tandem with the modern world.

We see calmative scenes of everyday interactions with the outside world, such as in Hayley Barker’s Side Yard with Kali (2022), an oil on linen portrayal of a flowering yard replete with potted plants. Melanie Schiff’s suite of three pigment prints (all 2021) of chamomile buds scattered atop silhouettes of limbs invoke the inextricability of nature, humanity and art. Meanwhile, Sterling Wells’ watercolor Agaves of Auto Zone (2022), which depicts garbage nestled under succulents in a parking lot, is an indictment of human intrusions affecting the plant species native to Southern California. And we see Sam Moyer’s While I’m in Paradise (2021), a plaster-coated canvas inlaid with marble fragments in a skeletal formation, in conversation with Beatriz Cortez’s unyielding wiry, steel sculpture of a tree, Roots 6 (2021).

There are simply too many notable works for me to do them all justice, but what I found especially refreshing about Shrubs is that the show doesn’t favor any one perspective or mode of meaning. Instead, the show honors each artist’s relationship to nature equally and celebrates a miscellaneous collection of responses to a world rife with spectacles. It’s exhilarating to see how so many talented artists view the world we inhabit and conjure abstractions or representations of it in so many different ways.

Night Gallery
2276 E 16th St
Los Angeles, CA 90021
Thru Feb. 5th, 2022