11.13.2023

The Garden of Eden is a garden. It is a growing exchange of substance and matter between artists and their works. Performances, installations, sculptures, and activations compose, recompose, and decompose through the twelve months of the exhibition’s run. There is a (self)consciously heterotopian impulse to this project as a chance to imagine what kinds of worlds we would like to be part of shaping. Like a garden, it is both a closed and an open circuit: its decay is always the beginning of growth and so it is counter to a narrative of finality in our dominant moment that forecloses ‘learning’ and ‘building’ with a demand to present a public self as an indivisibly completed being.

When I first met Nico, who is organizing the space and learning to play piano in it as the works turn over, he explained to me that Jo, the first artist in the show and now artist-in-residence, was running an exchange of roasted sweet potatoes for knowledge. The windows and doors of the gallery open onto the busy hum of Mission Street where vendors line the block selling jewelry, sweets, drinks, textiles, or books. Looking out to look in, the exhibition began with here. Jo had recently moved to San Francisco from the East Coast. So had Nico, but from Mexico City. So had I, returning home following years jumping around the United States. In some way, the exhibition is a theater for and of place, to orient ourselves in fostering a sustainable creative habitat to come.

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A planting. The exhibition began on October 21st with Jo Kim roasting and selling sweet potatoes for one US dollar or the exchange of knowledge inside the gallery every Saturday through November 11th. This was an action we called 1$ Knowledge. Jasmine Zhang followed with the performance and sound work, Toast, on October 26th.

On November 11th, works by Lucia Aguilar, Alonso Leon-Velarde, Austin Leong, Clara Li, Emelie Luostarinen (curated by Josefin Lundahl), Bob. Miron, and Leonel Salguero were installed.

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Nico ended this initial introduction with a quote from Lauren Berant, a supreme critic of the American Dream, hyperquoted here: “I have been thinking a lot about something Lauren Berlant said, “I want to be involved with people I don’t know to build a world that I can’t see yet.”” There is a subsumption of current emergent strategies of resistance against an individualizing logic of capital that seems to be asking our artists now to come, wherever they may emerge, as fully formed. I think with this exhibition Nico, and those of us involved by proximity, are asking to start with friendship instead. When leaving New York last month I kept telling my friends that I was different now because I know them. I’m different with each person I meet and know, and the act of making a new friend removes a false sense of completion I may have of myself because it requires play, corrected assumptions, grace, flirting, laughter, sensitivity, intimacy, embarrassment…

In the spirit of a growing garden, one particular to Eden which suggests that we already have all that we materially need, I think of a letter exchange between artists John Christie and John Berger called I Send You This Cadmium Red. In it, the two artists send themselves colors with observations about them – specific, personal, mournful, or humorous. The growing correspondence is a game that describes building a world from a chain of observations, knowing their differences will generate a generous yet conflicting analysis of how things are and why. Throughout the course of The Garden of Eden, I will be writing alongside it, conversing with the artworks and the artists contributing, and sending back observations that I hope do something similar.

Now, we are moving away from the inception and entry of this show, the project is underway. Where we go with it is exciting, but San Francisco, The United States, global networks at large and the contemporary moment that contains and connects them all feel remarkably vulnerable. I end with an offer of another Lauren Berlant quote, culled from their book Cruel Optimism about navigating through the world with or without aim – their definition of impasse which reads:

“The impasse is a stretch of time in which one moves around with a sense that the world is at once intensely present and enigmatic, such that the activity of living demands both a wandering absorbative awareness and a hyper vigilance that collects material that might help to clarify things, maintain one’s sea legs, and coordinate the standard melodramatic crises with those processes that have not yet found their genre of event.”

Emily Small
Throughout the course of the exhibition, Emily Small will be having an ongoing conversation in time and space with works and artists as they emerge and recede.

Downloadable PDF.