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The Marta art gallery LA displays various fantastical 'Objects for a Heavenly Cave'
Marta LA's exhibition Objects for a Heavenly Cave references the mythologies associated with the grotto
Image: Erik Benjamins
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The Marta art gallery LA displays various fantastical 'Objects for a Heavenly Cave'

The group exhibition is guest-curated by Krista Mileva-Frank and explores the many romantic ideals, myths and materialities of the grotto throughout art history.

by Mrinmayee Bhoot
Published on : Oct 04, 2024

"The grotto initially interested me as the antipode of the [19th century] conservatory—tenebrous and earthy, where the conservatory is light and vitreous," guest curator for Los Angeles-based art gallery Marta, Krista Mileva-Frank tells STIR about the fascination that developed into its exhibition, Objects for a Heavenly Cave. "Both structures were often featured in elite landscape gardens in the 17th through 19th centuries and both were controlled, hermetic spaces that solicited unique experiences of non-human nature," she continues, clarifying the dichotomy between the real and surreal, the natural and manufactured quality of the excavated spaces that are the focus of her study.

Featuring works by 13 designers and artists, the design exhibition, which takes its title from the first scholarly monograph on the grotto, the feminist historian Naomi Miller's Heavenly Caves: Reflections on the Garden Grotto (1982), is on display from September 7 - October 12, 2024. Mileva-Frank elaborates on the showcase, stressing how the grim grotto: hidden yet well-known in legend, deathly and fearsome yet teeming with life, has often suggested itself as sites where mythologies are most tangible and fables come alive. The artists featured in the Objects for a Heavenly Cave show bring these fables to life.

The mythical quality of caves would result in the popularity of the garden grotto in landscape designs across the 15th through 19th centuries, decorated to resemble caves or subterranean spaces but for these orchestrations to appear manicured. "In bringing diverse living and inert natural substances together, grottoes were richly multisensory spaces. This play of darkness and light, nature and artifice has allowed for fascinating permutations throughout history and continues to inspire artists and designers," she notes.

Works some designers such as London-based Emma Witter's The Soft Animal of Your Body series (2024), James Naish's Aphros (2024) candleholder and Japanese designer Masaomi Yasunaga's Melting Vessel 熔ける器 series (2024) reference encrustation and gritty deposits on the silty and earthy walls of caves with sediments building up over years, creating unique natural sculptural designs.

Others such as Mexican designers MT Objects' lush Flower Mountain Vase series (2021), New York-based Ficus Interfaith's Crab Bucket (2024), Emily Endo's otherworldly Siratus Drip (2024), Milan-based Valentina Cameranesi Sgroi's spiky glass designs and Charlap Hyman & Herrero's Nautilus Shell Pendant lighting designs (2024), invoke images of the creatures that dwell in these spaces.

While the garden grotto was in fashion till the Victorian era, Objects for a Heavenly Cave explores the afterlives of their savage yet controlled imagery. Representing a shifting landscape, playful yet calculated in drawing from nature, these not only conjure fantastical stories but point to a preoccupation with the control of nature of the Enlightenment era's culture.

The project's official release includes a set of art historical references for the contemporary artists to draw on, in their interpretations of the subterranean, including Renaissance landscape renditions such as Giambologna's Colossus of the Apennine Mountains at Pratolino, the Second Duchess of Richmond, Sarah Lennox's Shell House at Goodwood park in West Sussex and Juan O’Gorman's Casa Gruta in Mexico City. Some, the curator notes, incorporated their own references such as Bernard Palissy's ceramics crawling with creatures, which informed Naish's Aphros candelabra.

The various sculptures and artefacts are scattered throughout the exhibition space, propped up in different corners impassively, quite unlike the musty, dark space of a cave. Yet, some delightfully play into the overarching theme of the show. Witter's light sconces, for instance, crawl up the walls, like mushrooms growing out of cracks or rock overhangs. American artist Lily Clark's Water Thief (2024) is an art installation that invokes water dripping, drop by drop, slowly shifting and creating something new. The sculpture art features stones that look as if eroded. Meanwhile, Naish's Ombra (2024) and Corcycia bench (2024) represent the aftermath of water's presence: sedimentation. Even without meaning to, the space transforms into a home for nymphs, invoked in the fantastical designs for light sconces Eos (2024), One Handed House (2024) and House for Raindrops (2024) by American designers, A History of Frogs.

While the whimsical, fantastical and altogether kitsch aesthetic of the artefacts on display asks the visitor to suspend disbelief, and leave the world aboveground behind, the official release also draws attention to another aspect that the show wishes to highlight—a growing consciousness to bridge the divide between man and nature. As Mileva-Frank underscores through her research, the aim is to use the grotto to highlight the imbrication of the natural in the manmade, foregoing romantic notions of nature.

Elaborating on the vitality of these entanglements, she states, "What fascinates me most about the grotto is that it is a cultural artefact from that period that presents an alternative way of relating to nature. In imitating the craggy excrescences of volcanic rock or tree bark, the grotto turns on its head our notions of what parts of nature are beautiful or worth valorising." Be it the subliminal experience of emerging from the light to darkness or a growing concern with how we interact with the natural world, the exhibition at Marta presents wondrous, at times sinister and mostly light-hearted fantastical renditions of objects one might encounter in heavenly caves.

'Objects for a Heavenly Cave' is on view from September 7 – October 12, 2024, at the Marta gallery in Los Angeles.

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