BOTANICAL CAGE AND PERIMETER WALL, 2018
Photography: Etienne Frossard
Botanical Cage and Perimeter Wall, 2018, copper, wood, steel, concrete, ceramic, 5 x 16 x 12 ft.
Hunter College, 205 Hudson Gallery, New York, NY (April-May 2018)
https://www.huntermfastudio.org/mfa-thesis-exhibitions/spring-2018/rachelle-dang
Press:
Hyperallergic, “Laughter and Tears in Hunter College’s MFA Thesis Show (Zachary Small, May 2018)
https://hyperallergic.com/444514/hunter-college-2018-mfa-thesis-exhibition/
At the center of the site-specific installation, Botanical Cage and Perimeter Wall, is a copper-sheathed reconstruction of an 18th century shipping carrier designed to transport breadfruit saplings from Tahiti to England on long sea voyages. This project of imperial botany had the end goal of cultivating breadfruit in the Caribbean to buttress plantation profits and to relieve environmental catastrophe and famine from monocropping sugar. My rebuilt cabinet appears as an embellished prison or cage. I wanted to use materiality and the relationship to the body to provoke expanded readings about violence, slavery and labor, and the ecological legacies of colonialism in both Polynesia and the Caribbean. The cast and manipulated breadfruit forms appear at different stages of ripeness, decay, or rot; they convey ideas of consumption, waste, and ecological processes.