PETRICHOR

"Art is enchantment and artists have the right of spells."    Jeanette Winterson 

Petrichor is a carefully crafted fictional world, an imaginarium that pulls viewers in through visual enchantment and offers rich and varied meanings to those who choose to spend time, reflect, and engage.

Large-scale skeletal greenhouse structures, dark walls, and cool lighting link the exhibition spaces, orchestrating a sense of visual cohesion. Petrichor contains familiar plant and animal forms – a grouping of birds, a collection of bones, tree branches, human hands, honeycombs, and seashells. As viewers linger, the visual language of horticulture and the perfect order of the garden ‘cracks’ to reveal other meanings.

Crombach’s Concert of Birds references natural history collections, with the facial expressions of life-sized aluminium birds frozen in distress. In Fleuron and Garden Wall, bright flowers are pressed between broken glass and encased in bases of concrete muck and architectural ruins, further challenging the ordered nature of our built environments.

With Stern’s Signal Wicking, human hands gesture, floating in a dream-like way that emphasizes their vulnerability. In A Copper Nail to Kill as Tree, Stern reinforces this dream-like quality when one discovers that the tables float a few inches off the floor, with one leg of each table in the shape of a drooping ceramic arm. The arms read as resting or 'dead', making the work, like many others in Petrichor, hover between dream and nightmare.