NINA KATCHADOURIAN

The exhibition will focus on Katchadourian’s long-standing investigations of human relationships to the so-called ‘natural world,’ which have sometimes involved interventions that she terms ‘uninvited collaborations with nature.’ Nursery features recent sculptures from the artist’s Fake Plants project, which she began at the onset of the pandemic. In these works, Katchadourian transforms cast-off materials from her home, studio, and a nearby construction site into multifarious plant forms. Using materials such as discarded cardboard boxes, paper packaging from food products, disposable medical masks, cardboard toilet paper tubes, ping pong balls, sewing pins, Styrofoam, and toothpicks, Katchadourian creates peculiar, refined plant forms that seem to belong to unexplored or imagined landscapes. Katchadourian’s Artificial Insemination photographs will also be showcased in the East Hampton exhibition. In Katchadourian’s Artificial Insemination works, an iconic scientific image—the moment when a sperm fertilizes an egg—is deliberately misinterpreted and restaged: Katchadourian reimagines the scene using tadpoles fished out of a pond and a chicken’s egg placed in water on a dinner plate.

Many of Katchadourian’s explorations of natural phenomena begin on Pörtö, a small island group in the southern Finnish archipelago, where she grew up spending summers with her family and still visits for extended periods each year. With Renovated Mushroom (1998), the artist used a bicycle tire patching kit from her grandfather’s tool shed on Pörtö to mend tears on the caps of mushrooms. Katchadourian’s c-print resulting from this experiment depicts a cluster of mushrooms with colorful, circular patches on their caps, humorously combining the natural and the artificial.