A conversation between an artist and a gardener in the California border-landscape about creation, change, and loss.
An intertextual, fictionalized narrative weaves together several years of Mexican artist Erick Meyenberg’s observations, research, video recordings, and paintings based on logbooks kept by gardener Chris Shea. Meyenberg’s conversations with Shea about his ephemeral landscape infer the change and loss inherent in human life and propels the deep emotional intelligence of this bilingual book as it reflects on time, creation, and the inspiration of the natural world. Shea’s remarkable, nuanced, and delicate language for color is reflected in Meyenberg’s layered appreciation for the garden Shea tended until the end of his life. Eloisa Haudenschild, Director of inSite, commissioned Meyenberg’s project with Shea for haudenschildGarage in La Jolla, California, and enlisted curator Ruth Estévez, the text’s author.
For more information about the project see the haudenschildGarage website or DoppelHouse.com. Note: This book has two parts, one in English, one in Spanish.
Ruth Estévez is a curator and writer based in Mexico City and Boston. She is senior curator-at-large at The Rose Art Museum in Boston and co-curator of the 34th São Paolo Biennial. She is the 2019 co-curator of Idiorhythmias, an annual program of performance, music, poetry, and text at the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA). Estévez was director and curator at the Gallery at Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater (REDCAT) in Los Angeles from 2012 to 2018 and chief curator at the Carrillo Gil Art Museum in Mexico City from 2007 to 2012. In 2010, Estévez founded LIGA-Space for Architecture, a nonprofit platform focused on experimentation in architecture, urbanism, and public art.
Erick Meyenberg (Mexico City, 1980) is a Mexico City-based artist. He holds an MFA from the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK) in Germany and a BA in Visual Arts from the National School of Fine Arts (ENAP-UNAM) in Mexico. His work has been included in solo and group exhibitions in Mexico, Germany, Austria, Spain, Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Japan and in the public collections of the Amparo Museum, Puebla, Mexico; Museum of Contemporary Art- UNAM (MUAC), Mexico City; The Benetton Foundation, Milan and Rome, Italy; and Telefónica Foundation, Mexico.
The commissioner of the project, Eloisa Haudenschild, is a collector and active supporter of global contemporary art, especially the work of emerging artists and the artistic communities in Latin America, China, and Europe. Since 1997, she has been the director of the binational initiative inSite, which commissions artists to make new work in Mexico and the United States. In 2003, she founded the haudenschildGarage, which works with artists through international and regional projects and commissions to present symposia, lectures, and film screenings to the public. A series of artist residencies introduced a group of young Chinese artists to the United States for the first time. In early 2010, the haudenschildGarage entered into partnership with Fundación Migdalia Rubio, whose mission is to offer scholarships, labs, summer programs, and holiday dinners to economically challenged elementary and high school students in Tijuana, Mexico.
