I definitely felt there was a bit of a wink behind the choice to explore questions around nature and queerness amid a highly manicured garden on the edge of one of the country’s most densely populated cities. In two separate shows at Wave Hill Public Garden & Cultural Center, Ruben Natal-San Miguel: Nature Finds a Way and Perfect Trouble: Queering Natureculture, both curated by Rachel Raphaela Gugelberger, Gabriel de Guzman, and Afriti Bankwalla, the artists and works push against expectations of what constitutes the “natural,” with the shows’ setting adding real depth to the conversation.
The location for that conversation is not New York in general, but specifically the Bronx. A borough defined by its complexity and contradiction, the Bronx is infamous for Riker’s Island, entrenched poverty, and high rates of asthma exacerbated by low air quality, but it is also celebrated for birthing hip-hop culture, nurturing prominent street artists, and helping to shape Latin American culture in the United States. Many readers might be surprised to learn that it is also the borough with the most green space and that it contains the oldest uncut forest in the entire state.
Queerness, a central subject in both shows, is also complex and contradictory. Queer culture is often associated with highly developed urban areas (New York City houses the largest number of LGBTQ+ residents of any metropolitan area in the US), and yet queer people live in every imaginable environment. Add in longstanding and virulent false claims that LGBTQ+ people are somehow “unnatural” (despite ever-growing volumes of research confirming that variance in sex and sexuality are very much natural phenomena), and a certain degree of frisson in the relationship between queerness and the natural world is unsurprising.
Enter these two exhibitions.
Ruben Natal-San Miguel’s witty photography series, Nature Finds a Way, stands out for its sense of humor and camp, along with its direct challenge to social conventions meant to limit who gets to claim a relationship to the “natural,” and how. The work foregrounds queer and trans people, as well as people of color. No conversation about what nature means today would be complete without addressing race, given the ongoing gaps in who has access to or feels comfortable in green spaces, along with significant contemporary efforts to counter those disparities.
These photos highlight a bitter irony: The Bronx has the largest BIPOC population of the five boroughs, with a Latinx majority comprised primarily of Puerto Rican and Dominican immigrants and their descendants. As such, Bronx residents of color often carry deep ties to parts of the world where it’s far easier to exit the built environment than it is in New York. In one of my favorite photos, “It All Comes Out in the Wash (Nykki)” (2019), we are inside a laundromat, its machines adorned in brightly colored floral motifs. The subject, Nykki, holds open a washing machine door, simultaneously posing and seemingly beckoning us into the machine. In another, a flower seller peers out from behind the sliding doors of her stall holding cellophane-wrapped bunches of carnations dyed in artificial shades of blue, purple, and green. And in a grouping of four photographs, those depicted adorn themselves in wigs, tattoos, flags, and a plastic octopus, each a synthetic representation of a “real” object, being, or concept. The photographs are not questioning who needs or wants to be around natural forms and greener areas (those are basic human needs), but rather asserting the competing needs, desires, and realities so many people have to juggle. Here we see adaptation, and a refusal to relinquish a relationship to nature.
Perfect Trouble: Queering Natureculture feels more mixed overall, but the context and the curators’ questions pull the experience together. In Erin Johnson’s video piece, “There are things in this world that are yet to be named” (2020), a group of botanists from the Huntington Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California, study a rare Australian bush tomato species (solanum plastisexum), a plant that defies easy categorization because it lacks a stable or singular sexual expression. As the camera moves through the garden spaces (similar to parts of Wave Hill), we see scientists attempting to understand something that counters current categories of plant biology. The video’s narration includes excerpts from letters written by author Rachel Carson (who famously rang the alarm bells for environmental devastation with her 1962 book Silent Spring) to her lover, Dorothy Freeman. The letters are filled with longing, to feel both connected and understood.
Seba Calfuqueo’s photographs and videos oppose barriers and boundaries of many kinds: the separation of humans and nonhumans, the uses and adaptations of native and non-native species, and whether ever-flowing water can constitute a territory. The latter is particularly relevant because Calfuqueo’s traditional Mapuche lands, Wallmapu, span parts of what is now southern Chile, a country whose government under dictator Augusto Pinochet brought about an ongoing water crisis by privatizing water. Christopher Udemezue’s photographs, often in sculptural frames, evoke ritual, sex, desire, and secrecy within plant-filled spaces where the boundaries between bodies, plants, earth, and sacred acts are enmeshed. Udemezue’s works both invite and challenge the viewer’s gaze: What are you looking at? Is it for you? And what can you really know about what’s happening here?
Rachel Youn’s kinetic sculptures address some of the same themes as Ruben Natal-San Miguel’s work, but with a much drier sense of humor. Plastic flowers jostle and bump awkwardly against one another, moving at the behest of deconstructed machines, such as the “masseur” a portable massage tool produced for consumers in the 1990s. The false intimacy, mechanical stimulation, and simulated nature of the plastic flowers call up so much, from the city’s ubiquitous street-level massage parlors to the repetitive monotony of dating apps, the popularization of “self-care” over collective care, and the existential isolation brought on by paltry imitations of desired human contact. Within the context of this show, Youn’s sculptures seem to cast doubt on the question of the natural by teasing us with hints of just how much effort, money, and petroleum we use up creating or experiencing artificial realities.
When I see the word “queering” applied to anything these days I often find myself groaning. It’s a term that has come to mean a lot of nothing in its overuse and vagaries. I prefer to stay rooted in its core meanings: recognizing expansive sexualities and moving beyond a binary understanding of gender, as well as refusing biological limits to kinship. From this perspective, I feel that these two shows offer much worth considering, particularly as a lens to look anew at the highly manicured “nature” of Wave Hill itself. Most obviously, the work unsettles binaries such natural/unnatural or domesticated/wild, but what most stood out for me after my visit was our culture’s continued longing for, or belief in, a “pure” form of nature — just as some believe in “pure” bodies, or types of sex and love. There’s no place left on Earth that hasn’t been impacted by humans, and many of the areas we think of as natural or wild, like national parks or wildlife refuges, are actually subject to enormous human intervention. Together, the exhibitions and artworks, as well as Wave Hill and the Bronx, cast a critical eye on our fantasy of nature as it crashes up against the realities of the world we humans have created.
Ruben Natal-San Miguel: Nature Finds a Way and Perfect Trouble: Queering Natureculture continue at Wave Hill Public Garden & Cultural Center (4900 Independence Avenue, Bronx, New York) through August 11. The exhibitions were curated by Rachel Raphaela Gugelberger, Gabriel de Guzman, and Afriti Bankwalla.
