SPROUT
November 2024 - January 2025 at FX Collaborative, Brookyln, NY
Sprout permeates FX Collaborative with abundant flora, overgrowing in the modern space like plants in the cracks of New York’s sidewalks. Sprout is a visual dissertation on the science of plants found throughout New York City’s tree pits and parks. A collection of oil and gouache paintings, furniture, scientific displays, essays, and plushies through the lens of 1950-70’s monster films create a world of botanical behemoths besieging urban spaces.
Sunflowers, known for their soil purification abilities, seed the origins of this monstrous world. Planted at nuclear disaster sites to remove radiation, Henry sowed sunflowers in their own tree pit to take out its impurities. The Mammoth Sunflowers towered over the street and found their way onto the canvases Himawari and Solar Flare: Sunflower. Using forced perspective of the aforementioned with slate, flat skies gives the flora a monstrous appearance reminiscent of Showa-Era Godzilla films.The thematic nature of perspective and flat sky recurs throughout the other works as a timid lily, a parental willow tree, a blooming magnolia, and tentacle-like Yoshino branches breaching into the full foliage creatures overhead.
Henry investigated the environments of their subjects and discovered monsters were attacking New York! By collecting small forms for the monster hunters in attendance, they are now securely exhibited as ottoman trophies and scientific displays of Doro, Mori, Umi, and Baby Wari. Notation and paintings give further insight into the monsters’ nature. In their research, the way the monsters view the world was discovered and put on display in Kaiju Perspective, a mixed media drawing of Ridgewood, New York. The natural world is rendered in oils, towering over the crayon buildings, whose man made forms are unregistrable to the monsters. The three contours which try to create a single line fall victim to the reclamation of the arboreal cousins of the monsters. The world closes in at the edges of the painting, bookended by the overgrowth of taro plant paintings; the final image of the plants' sublime annihilation of urbanism.
Opening reception had composition and live performance by Saiga. He created a five part movement to accompany the exhibition. Post artist talk, Saiga was joined by Phib and Charlie H. to close out the evening.
