Matthew Brandt & Christine Nguyen: Garden Pictures | Project Room

20 January - 17 February 2024

Overview

The domestic landscape, expressed through the manicured gardens of Brandt and Nguyen, is a unique, designed site where nature and human intervention meet.

David B. Smith Gallery is pleased to present Garden Pictures, a special collaboration between Los Angeles-based artist Matthew Brandt and Denver-based artist Christine Nguyen. In their collaboration, Brandt and Nguyen compiled, manipulated, and layered images taken of their home gardens to produce vibrant photo collages that hark back to each artist’s nostalgic relationship to analog darkroom processes.

Presented in the dead of winter, vivid plants and electrified ferns unfurl in the gallery’s Project Room. Bordered by commercial photo paper boxes, works in the exhibition delightfully challenge and obscure the final image. The now novel tactility of darkroom experimentation, the intimacy of cultivated gardens, and the interplay of digital and physical come to colorful fruition in Matthew Brandt’s and Christine Nguyen’s Garden Pictures.