A garden variety of art at Wave Hill

Wave Hill’s Wild Garden is as much about utility as it is about beauty. The one-acre patch of land is fashioned after Irish gardener William Robinson’s book The Wild Garden, about combining hardy plant species from all over the world on a single landscape.

For Wave Hill’s newest exhibit, Tending Toward the Untamed: Artists Respond to the Wild Garden, being shown at the Glyndor Gallery through Sunday, Aug. 19, eight artists respond to the garden as it blooms. 

Gary Carsley adorned a cheap IKEA closet, chairs and a stool with images of the garden. 

“It’s meant to look wild,” said exhibit curator Jennifer McGregor about the piece, “D.100.”

But when you look closely, you see that nothing is at is seems. You notice the closet only looks like it’s made of wood and the outdoorsy colors only look like they are shades of green. Instead, images of the garden are manipulated so that what appear to be colors from afar reveal themselves as different shades and patterns of wood grain up close. 

Like the garden, the apparently natural wildness was the result of meticulous planning to make it look that way.  

The IKEA furniture stands out from the Glyndor Gallery’s ornate fireplaces with woodcarvings. The centerpiece is an image of Wave Hill’s splintered white fir that exploded after it was struck by lightning last summer.  

Eight artists from around the world visited Wave Hill to experience the “tension between the Wild Garden’s seemingly untamed appearance and the intensive activity required to create and maintain it.”