Chicago Artists Coalition proudly presents Garden of Liminal Bodies, a two-person exhibition by 2023-24 HATCH Residents Molly Blumberg and Vince Phan, curated by Christian Gonzalez Ho.

Garden of Liminal Bodies featuring Molly Blumberg and Vince Phan invokes gardens from the Japanese roji to the Islamic gardens of Madinat al-Zahra to Heironymous Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights. Blooming, budding, fruiting and dying, the bodies in a garden, like the human body, are constantly changing; within the space of the garden, we are drawn into their liminal state of flux.

Historically, the garden was designed to enfold the body, mind, and spirit of the guest into both the natural and cultural ecologies it hosted. With rare exception, the terrestrial delight of the garden was its capacity to offer an embodied meditation on life, death, and numinous relations of bodies. Gardens reintroduce us to space-time in the languages of our senses. To enter a garden is to become aware of bodies in flux (plants, animals, geologic formations, art, etc.), human and non-human. These bodies, when encountered through the senses, cease to be distant and become “intimate experience[s] of the sensate body.”*

Blumberg’s diaphanous membranes bear an uncanny resemblance to our skin’s variation in texture, tautness, and sagging. This bodily resonance slowly transposes the work so that it is not simply noted mentally, but begins to get under our own skin. Eventually, we do not simply recognize the surfaces as familiar, but we experience them through a strange proprioception.

The fleshly floral bodies of Phan’s sculptures operate at a different register. The cured meat works present us with the uncanny inside-out condition of flesh outside its body, forming another body. This inside-outness, in the form of a flower, catalyzes a surreal vertigo that heightens an awareness of what is under our skin, the fleshiness and ephemerality of our carnal form.

Garden of Liminal Bodies produces an embodied awareness within us by means of the sculptural bodies around us. Over time, these bodies begin to slip within our own or become extensions of our own. The effect reintroduces us to the familiar unfamiliarity of our bodies as a field of contingent and evolving relationships with the world around it.

Molly Blumberg’s sculptural practice sits in the spaces between our human bodies and the materiality of lived environments, imagining their potential permeabilities. Trained as a sculptor and a papermaker, her work is grounded in an extreme engagement with materiality. Through a playfully physical studio practice and a dedication to process based exploration, she explores how it feels to be a body.

Vince Phan’s works are systems-oriented investigations of chaos in nature and the nature in the chaos. They adopt furniture and compost organic materials to create a hybridized existence of humans and nature. These creations are then traded for soil in human-occupied territories in order to create a new terra of possibility. Hybridizing objects and materials, they re-naturalize the man-made back into a natural ecology that once was its birthplace but has now become foreign.

Christian Gonzalez Ho is a PhD candidate in Art History at Stanford university and holds a Master of Architecture degree from Harvard University. Christian works as a cultural theorist, curator, art historian, and architectural designer, with a focus how art and architecture mediate relationships with the self, others, and the numinous.

- Christian Gonzalez Ho

The opening reception will be on May 3 from 5-8pm.

Special thanks to Sophie Buchmueller, who coordinated the collaboration between these artists and laid the groundwork for this exhibition.

Image: Molly Blumberg and Vince Phan, The Order of Earthy Delights, Deconstructed chair, flowerpot, tights, cured meat, concrete, 22” x 10” x 44”

*D. Fairchild Ruggles, “Scent, Sound, and the Senses in Islamic Gardens of al-Andalus,” in Knowing Bodies, Passionate Souls: Sense Perceptions in Byzantium, ed. Susan Ashbrook Harvey and Margeret Mullett (Washington, DC, 2017), 127.