Artist Rob Carter is interested in the relationship between the built environment and nature, and his newest exhibition, which opens tomorrow in New York City, features mini replicas of three homesteads — Charles Darwin’s, Henry David Thoreau’s, and Sir John Bennet Lawes’. The miniatures live in a garden of dandelions, bush beans, and corn, which over the course of the exhibit will take over the houses:
Viewers are invited to witness as the garden overcomes the estates in Carter’s controlled but fragile ecosystem in three distinct ways: time-based video projections, peepholes cut into the sides of the garden, and from an elevated viewing platform.
If you won’t be in or around New York in the next 10 weeks, while the exhibit runs, we recommend Carter’s 2008 video, in which a model of Charlotte, N.C., develops and then sinks back into the earth. Stadiums fly in, highways unravel, creaking skyscrapers zoom up from the ground, but in the end, the plants win:
