Garden of Earthly Delights

Did God really tell you not to eat from any of the trees in the garden? The woman answered the serpent: We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden; it is only about the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden that God said, 'You shall not eat it or even touch it, lest you die.' But the serpent said to the woman: 'You certainly will not die! No, God knows well that the moment you eat of it your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods who know what is good and what is bad. GN 3: 1-5

Like this cautionary exchange between the serpent and Eve in the Garden of Eden, artists have traditionally tempted and provoked mainstream society to examine itself from both outside and inside. They present their reluctant and ignorant audience with beautiful and desirable objects and ask them to engage their dulled senses; to open their eyes to both the good and the bad. The artists in this group exhibition at Kustera Tilton Gallery entitled Garden of Earthly Delights challenge their viewers' gaze through a blend of genres, issues and techniques: surrealism, racial and gender stereotypes, and collage, to name a few. What each of these artists share is a unique relationship to the "garden", or more specifically the landscape.

Loren Holland's women inhabit their own particular gardens of delight and detritus. Clad in bikinis or other skimpy outfits they wander through the lush forests stepping over the pop culture items of any young woman's life: make-up, fast food, boom box, jewelry, etc. But Holland's women are completely in their own element, not lost or innocent of their surroundings. Is it a lair or is it home?

Loren Holland is a recent graduate of Yale University and is exhibiting her work for the first time in New York with Kustera Tilton Gallery.

Maura Bendett's sculptural work transforms space and form into early heretical imaginative landscape, making it appear almost as captaining that has somehow broken through the rigid confines of the picture plane. Made from such materials as plastic, acrylic, fishing line, paper, polymer and resin, the work is bold and seductive creating a tension between chaos and order, beauty and form.

Maura Bendett lives and works in Los Angeles. This past summer she premiered her most recent body of work at Roberts & Tilton Gallery in Los Angeles.

Fay Ray's collages embrace the expanse and overwhelming power of both the physical landscape as well as that of the exponential growth of human gluttony. Flesh, jewels, cars, all spew forth from such places of natural beauty as the Grand Canyon. Ray seems to not so subtly acknowledge the parallel between the desire to capture the earth's awesome splendor and the utter folly of such splendor in the face of unstoppable, wasteful consumption.

Fay Ray is a recent graduate of Columbia University School of the Arts in New York. Her work is currently included in The Selected Files 2005 exhibition at the El Muse el Barrio in New York. This is her first time exhibiting with Kustera Tilton Gallery.

Alison Elizabeth Taylor's young women inhabit vast barren landscapes constructed of out contact paper - that staple of middle class American home decorating marketed to make cheap construction materials appear more sumptuous than they are .Taylor's characters literally take apart these facades of suburban affluence and class. In Tuesday Dusk, Boulder Highway, 2005, two women examine a phonograph and albums like an archeologist might look at a burial site, curious about the faded glory of these suburban trappings.

Alison Elizabeth Taylor is a recent graduate of Columbia University School of the Arts. This is her first time exhibiting with Kustera Tilton Gallery.

Suzanne Wright explores the landscape from both the inner and outer"scapes". In a series of drawings, she creates what appears to be a children's fantasy forest complete with candy cane plants,colorful streams, and cute bonnet wearing, basket carrying,moppet's roaming through the brightly hued trees. However, closer inspection of the basket reveals more sinister contents. In another work, Choo, Choo, 2005 Wright, takes the metaphor of landscape inwards by deftly drawing a pornographic image of a woman's backside combined with a train tunnel. The two images juxtaposed with the classic drapery and the large scale of the drawing itself reminds the viewer of history and landscape painting from the 18th and 19th Centuries.

Susan Wright's work has been included in numerous exhibitions in Brooklyn and New York and was featured in a White Columns White Room in 1999.

Garden of Earthly Delights

Künstler: Maura Bendett, Loren Holland, Fay Ray Alison Elizabeth Taylor, Suzanne Wright