Two concurrent photography exhibits at Delaware Art Museum offer multiple artistic visions of gardens and landscapes. The exhibits are entitled, “Contemporary Photography and the Garden - Deceits & Fantasies” and “The Cultivated Eye - Brandywine Valley Photographers”.

“Deceits and Fantasies” brings together the work of 16 contemporary American and European photographers who employ the garden to express intellectual ideas or metaphorical statements. Many of these works are large in scale (2 feet or larger), slightly abstract (mostly blurred, darkened, or distorted) and express solitude and isolation (no people in these gardens). “Air” by Sally Apfelbaum is a multi-layered, large-scale color photo of Monet’s Garden at Giverny that is less about the vitality of a living landscape than it is about the passage and erosive effects of time. Other works in the exhibit depict such topics as dreamscapes or distant memories. Linda Hackett works with a pinhole camera to create pensive out-of-focus color photos like “Rudbeckia” which seems to record ethereal effects of wind moving through a garden. Some of the liveliest work in the exhibit, Marc Quinn’s “Italian Landscape (6)”, and “Italian Landscape (8)”, are two large acid-colored digital photographs printed on canvas that present an improbable diorama of posed, monster-sized waxy blooms – 12” tulips and 18” chrysanthemums. These amusing, stagy set-ups more closely resemble the plastic backdrop for a fish tank than conventional notions of “high art”, and that’s what makes them arresting. “Deceits and Fantasies” is an intellectual show about atmosphere, symbolism and mood. This exhibit entertained me because the photographs made me think about the artists’ unique responses to the gardens they observed, rather than just reveal the garden subjects that they captured.

The second exhibit, “The Cultivated Eye” is composed of nature photography from regional artists. Many of the works in this exhibit present local Brandywine Valley landscapes, some of which were familiar not only to me but also to my 12 year old son. The works are moderately sized (less than 2 feet) and feel tangibly connected to the gardens and to our shared life in the region. Some are instantly recognizable scenes, like Rob Cardillo’s stately view of water lilies at Longwood Gardens, entitled “Nymphaea ‘Emily Grant Hutchings’”. For anyone who has spent time staring at these transcendent aquatic plants, you will swear a Kennett Square dragonfly just hovered off the flower bud and out of view. Carson Zullinger’s seductive color photo of massive tree roots from Hawaii entitled, “Allerton Garden, Kauai” hypnotically invites us to enter and lose ourselves in their sensuous folds.  Other pieces take elements of familiar landscapes and change them with new visions. “Journey of King Namaes” by Mickey Freed takes a familiar Brandywine Valley tree and its roots and transforms it into a trippy repeated-motif abstraction reminiscent of the bent reality of M.C. Escher. Alida Fish’s toned and sophisticated digitally altered photos wittily combine the ideal beauty of classical figurative garden sculpture with the somewhat-less-than-ideal, but more familiar, beauty of actual human bodies. The works in this exhibit, although smaller in stature than those in the “Deceits and Fantasies” exhibit, capture a vitality of nature that ultimately satisfies and intrigues us with what is familiar, but stays strangely beyond our grasp.

In the end, these two complementary exhibits provide a broad point of view of contemporary photography.  They both offer multiple artistic statements that start with visions of gardens and landscapes – and that’s about the extent of their common ground.

Roberta Tucci is a Wilmington painter and an Associate Professor of Studio Art at Delaware State University.  Her work is included in numerous public and private collections.