Strolling Through ‘Profane Gardens’ Is Easy on the Eyes yet Provocative

As every gardener knows, even the smallest plot of earth can be a battleground between somebody’s best-laid plans and the stubborn course of nature. So it’s not surprising that artists looking for metaphors for contemporary life are attracted to garden imagery.

Happily for viewers, flowers and greenery--whether rendered in paint or plastic, blurred on a video screen or turned into strange pieces of tableware--tend to be visually appealing even when the artists are deliberately foiling normal expectations.

For “East of Eden: Profane Gardens,” Guggenheim Gallery co-director Richard Turner selected artists who perform their mischief on cultivated and even untamed (but artistically celebrated) landscapes, as well as traditional representations of gardens. The show at the Orange gallery runs through March 8.

Jacci den Hartog’s glistening polyurethane and plaster sculptures translate aspects of Chinese landscape painting of the Sung and Yuan dynasties into three-dimensional form. But, while painted mountain peaks partially obscured by mist recede into the distance, Den Hartog’s landscapes push out aggressively into the viewer’s space.

In “Where the Rivers Meet,” white clumps of mountains that resemble hunched, cloaked figures are washed by translucent, stilled waterfalls and blue rivers (runny trails of paint). Despite funky materials that scream “fake!” the piece has a gloriously transcendent quality. It frees viewers to see how gifted artists throughout history have channeled the facts of landscape into distinctive personal visions.

Michael Pierzynski borrows freely from the world of kitsch to make his dancing ceramic trees (“Cultivating Internal Plastic Infinity”) and flower-petal dishes with built-in hard-boiled eggs (“Another World Inside This One”).

By doing so, he emphasizes how fluid our concepts of the natural world are, whether we realize it or not. We have no trouble imagining the vital force that causes tree limbs to reach out to one another as a form of human social interaction. Yet we may not realize how frequently we incorporate elemental natural objects into our notions of beauty and utility.

Liz Craft’s “Mound”--a “field” of plastic four-leaf clovers covering a curved hunk of foam--is pure fakery, and not just because of the materials. Two tiny toy deer dwarfed by this ersatz greenery contradict our normal sense of scale. An ordinary hillock becomes a fantastic little world of lucky clovers looming over defenseless animals that make Bambi look positively Tony-the-Tiger-ish. We actually fall for this kind of foolery all the time, in theme parks, animated movies and backyard decorations.

Patrick Nickell and Maura Bendett use botanical bits of the natural world in frank, lovely designs that embrace nature and culture in equal measure.

Nickell’s exquisite pencil drawings effortlessly weave tendrils and leaves into the S-curves and lariat-like flourishes employed by centuries of designers, from the pages of medieval illustrated manuscripts to the tracery of wrought-iron fences. The breathtaking ease of these large, untitled drawings, which shift from dark to medium to pale gray as if controlled by some unseen, flickering dance of sun and shadow, are paeans to natural grace.

Bendett’s “Disintegrating Flowers” wall piece is made of distinctively varied cut-out flower shapes (and collaged small drawings that might be molecular diagrams or space stations), attached to one another with plastic strands and stretched on nails to form a large circle on the wall. While the floral variations suggest infinite mutation, the finite compass of the circle and the connective strands reinforce the sense of limitation, fragility and interdependence.

Last year, Bendett began working with rounded, often translucent, droplets of colored resin, attached to strings that let them dangle freely. In “Elfin Mer,” combined with floral imagery, they become a fairy-tale form of rain; in “Wish Universe,” they form little bubbles like byproducts from some fantastic experiment.

In this eye-dazzling company, Elizabeth Bryant’s work (“Autumn Brook/Katsura Tea Garden”) seems hollowly didactic. She cuts flocks of irregular holes--representing the plan of a formal garden in Japan--into a banal landscape poster. The point is to play one form of human control of nature (the photographer’s vision) with another (a garden ordered according to cultural or philosophical ideals). But the visual effect falls flat.

Surely the oddest piece in the show is Dana Duff’s “Why I Am Disappointed.” She turns a vegetable (gourd) into an animal (goose) and makes it “talk,” using a cartoon-like graphic device. A flower in a glass globe and a purple glass pumpkin--both resting on chlorophyll-stained linen cloths--suggests a major dislocation between nature and culture.

Although radical landscape imagery has been a popular subject for the past few years, giving certain younger Los Angeles artists much critical currency, they and their contemporaries have more to show and tell.

It’s good to see some of these familiar and new voices at Chapman University.

* “East of Eden: Profane Gardens,” through March 8 at Guggenheim Gallery, Chapman University, 333 N. Glassell St., Orange. Free. Noon-5 p.m. Monday-Friday; 11 a.m.-3 p.m. Saturday. (714) 997-6729.