Visual Art
10.18.24
Andrea Blum Ania Szremski

The artist’s new exhibition teases the boundaries between captivity and
freedom, terror and desire.

Andrea Blum: BIOTA, installation view. Courtesy Hunter College Art Galleries.

Andrea Blum: BIOTA, curated by Jenny Jaskey and organized by Katie Hood Morgan, 205 Hudson Gallery, 205 Hudson Street, New York City, through October 26, 2024

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Cork and iron, MDF and mohair, steel and birds, concrete and cacti—these are some of the incongruous materials that combine to form Andrea Blum’s sly propositions for environments in which to live in an interspecies way. These propositions—some materialized, many not—are currently on view in BIOTA at Hunter College’s 205 Hudson Gallery, an exhibition whose slender size belies the exhilarating inventiveness of a four-decade practice swimming fluidly between art, design, architecture, and public intervention. It’s a practice that encourages the following question about the distinctions between these categories: Who cares? It’s all peacocks, all the way down. Throughout her career, the New York City artist, a former professor at Hunter and a self-described fifth-generation Manhattanite, has been fascinated with capital-N Nature, from the specific perspective of a “city person.” The show brings together computer-generated drawings, collages, videos, and furniture dating from 2008 to 2024 that fuse elements of both landscapes into human-scale forms with varying degrees of functional practicality.

Andrea Blum, SRF_13B_2022, 2022. Inkjet print on Epson archival paper, 28 × 28 inches. Courtesy the artist. © Andrea Blum.

The split-level gallery is loosely divided into four zones, with the lower level chiefly occupied by two series of photograph-like black-and-white inkjet prints generated by a Cinema 4D computer program. The six chiaroscuro examples from SRF (2020–22) conjure associations of light playing on a swampy surface, or maybe, on a more macro scale, of the Earth seen from an interplanetary distance; the five grisaille prints from NBF (2023–24) numinously evoke cloudlike amoebas or irregular bubbles of bacteria. These ambiguous, more cerebral evocations of the natural world demurely set the conceptual stage for the vibrant heart of the exhibit, a few steps up on the gallery’s second tier: a choreography of glowing screens and living furniture-sculptures illuminated by grow lamps.

Andrea Blum, NBF_06_2023, 2023. Inkjet print on Epson archival paper, 44 × 44 inches. Courtesy the artist. © Andrea Blum.

First, the lightbox Birdhouse III (2024) presents a lustrous image of Blum’s 2013 installation at La Conserva Centro De Arte Contemporáneo in Murcia, Spain: a spacious, screened-in enclosure, like a terrarium at architectural scale, complete with soil, rocks, and trees, on whose branches are perched round reddish beings. A forest-green pagoda sits behind them—audiences were invited to enter this nesting-doll metal structure to view the parrots up close, both human and bird held captive within the artwork (though the humans were the only ones with the choice to leave).

Andrea Blum: BIOTA, installation view. Courtesy Hunter College Art Galleries. Pictured: Birdhouse III, 2024.

These tensions between proximity and barrier (look but don’t touch), captivity and freedom, introduce the teasing eroticism that also underlies the sculptural objects on view. The perforated stainless-steel Lizard (2008), the room’s charismatic centerpiece, is a zigzagging amalgamation of a fainting couch connected to a bench by way of a planter in the middle, in which six spiky succulents grow toward the overhead light. One body could presumably recline on the couch while another sat on the bench, two bodies in proximity but separated by thorns, though the obdurate hardness of the steel structure makes one suspicious of its invitation to repose. Cactus I (2009) similarly skews expectations of soft and hard. From a distance, the ziggurat-like desk, all angles and steps, looks to be fabricated simply of firm plywood—on closer inspection, that plywood reveals itself to have been covered with fuzzy mohair, fairly begging to be caressed. It is crowned by two vitrines housing seven more desert plants, beaming in incandescence, the rich emerald of their chloroplasts heightened by the fawn of the luxurious goat hair beneath.

Andrea Blum: BIOTA, installation view. Courtesy Hunter College Art Galleries. Pictured, foreground: Lizard, 2008. Background, left to right: Babel, 2008; Canary, 2021/24; Cactus I, 2009; Desert Panorama, 2019/21.

Blum has written that, as a New Yorker, she has “always regarded nature with a certain amount of awe and trepidation,” and that she prefers “to observe other life forms from a distance in order to create a protective barrier between the subject, the object and me.” Perhaps this is why all these examples of furniture for communing with nonhuman life seem informed by an approach of capture, like the fabulous love seat that is Babel (2008): another stainless-steel piece, the curve of a seat leading into a tiered, perforated structure that suggests a study for an opera house or amphitheater, which is paired with a small low-slung screen. From the seat, we can observe the looped single-channel video Canary (2021/24), in which the eponymous feathered friend sits perched in a cage, forever.

Andrea Blum, Peacock, 2019/24 (still). Single-channel video (loop), 2 minutes 52 seconds. Courtesy the artist. © Andrea Blum.

The other videos on display (Woods, 2019/2024; Peacock, 2019/2024; and the four-channel Desert Panorama, 2019/2021)—very short repeating loops that read as photographs, until you notice the peacock winking, or a lone insect flitting through trees—also seem like cages, holding views of a natural world as tempting as it is terrifying to us, the concrete-bound. Taking all these works together, the approach made me uneasy: Are these proposals, this strapping of birds into artworks and plants into metal, this use of nonhuman life-forms as objects for human desire, actually authoritarian in their practice of capture and observation? But maybe this is, in fact, the point. There is an uncomfortable honesty about these psychosocial propositions that stands out in an art-world landscape rife with repetitive, sometimes supercilious suggestions for interspecies living that pretend not to acknowledge our ache for possession. In accommodating this yearning for control, Blum creates an environment as seductive and titillating as it is prickling, just as the tantalizing offer to lie down on the steel couch would surely lead to a sore back.

Andrea Blum, 59 Propositions, 2014–16. Computer generated images. Courtesy the artist. © Andrea Blum.

In the remaining two zones, the exhibition is bookended by the artist’s notes. At the entrance to 205 Hudson, Blum has designed a set for the gallery attendant, covering their nook and desk with MDF lacquered or polished to resemble tanned hide. Here, a video monitor plays 59 Propositions (2014–16), computer-generated schemas for future projects. In a small room at the opposite end of the ground floor is a series of collages made in the summer of 2021 that combine clippings from the New York Times with tantalizing clues for unrealized works: images of more peacocks, jellyfish, bundles of concrete slabs trepidatiously hanging from the ceiling, more plants sprouting from man-made forms. All these unrealizations made me long for a rigorously comprehensive, museum-scale presentation of Blum’s work, also because this show offers virtually no information about the objects on view. Whether it was a curatorial choice or one by the artist, there are no extended labels, no gallery guide. (I took to the internet to try to learn more, but found surprisingly little; Hunter’s forthcoming monograph on the artist seems long overdue.) At the same time, there is something daring about this open-ended method, in which nothing is overdetermined, and the viewer is invited to speculate, to become aware of their own appetites in the encounters with the works—for nature, for more.

Ania Szremski is the senior editor of 4Columns.

The artist’s new exhibition teases the boundaries between captivity and freedom, terror and desire.
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