With an upcoming installation, the Institute of Contemporary Art is looking to bring the avant-garde to a local garden.
The ICA, located near campus, debuts its "Soft Sites" exhibition this Friday. The exhibit will feature six works from international artists in Philadelphia's historical Bartram's Garden at 54th Street and Lindbergh Boulevard.
The installations, which are nearly complete, are designed to interact with the reservation's gardens, rivers, forests and barns, as well as with the plant life that is the legacy of original owner John Bartram, a colonial-era botanist and explorer.
Artist Jane Benson will present a "Monument to Weeds" exhibit that commemorates native plants deemed "noxious" by the Department of Agriculture, such as Canadian thistle and marijuana.
Artists Jimbo Blachly and Lytle Shaw will collaborate on the Chadwick Family Papers, a mock-archaeological site in the garden's wetlands that creates the mysterious artifacts of a fictional forgotten member of the Bartram family, Hieronymous Chadwick Bartram.
Components of the exhibition will also be shown at the ICA. Unlike those at Bartram's Garden, these installations are mobile and are "responding to the deep instability of public space, and place in general," said site curator Sara Reisman.
Reisman hopes the contrast between the gallery projects and the garden installations will make their audiences consider what it means for a piece of art to be site-specific.
"The idea in contemporary art is to present work in a very clean context where the environment of the space isn't going to compete with the meaning of the work or the reception of the work," Reisman said."
She added the garden will achieve this aim with ease.
"I thought a place like Bartram's Garden that has been under preservation for 250 years would be an interesting counterpoint to 'Soft Sites,' and it would operate as a hard site, one that doesn't change."
The exhibition opens Friday with a walkthrough at the ICA and an artist's tour of the garden installations Saturday at Bartram's Garden. It will run until July 30.
"It's nice that people can see that art is not just stagnant, that it's constantly evolving," said Melanie Snyder, a spokeswoman for Bartram's Garden. "This place doesn't necessarily always need to be a historical element; it can tie the historical element into modern art."
