The Enchanted Garden explores home, heritage, and inheritance. I consider the ways our environment shapes us, as it has shaped the people who have come before us. It is an attempt to understand Palo Alto—where I grew up, where I was shaped, and where I felt and still feel on the outside looking in. A city whose name is so loaded, with the lore of innovation and fortunes made in garages often top of mind, is in its own way “enchanted.”
Named for my father’s gardening business, The Enchanted Garden includes opulent botanical still life and time-worn gardening tools that recall my childhood in Palo Alto. The images of botanicals represent trees and plants that are common in Palo Alto and throughout the Bay Area. The wallpaper covering the gallery walls attempts the impossible task of organizing nature the way a gardener might, through arranged patterns that change as the viewer moves through the installation. Artworks hung atop the wallpaper echo layers of history and memories on which our knowledge and beliefs have been built.
Consider all that brings a garden together: the plants, the labor, the tools, and the necessary property. Moreover, there is the colonial desire to control nature, to make something neat when it is inherently messy, to create simplified order from what is vastly more complicated, and to categorize and define things that lie outside of our understanding. Beyond the landscape, The Enchanted Garden also unpacks my experiences of growing up in Palo Alto, trying to fit into a space where I didn’t, and expectations that I did not meet or fully comprehend.
Creating this installation at Palo Alto Art Center is central to the work, bringing the project to life where I remember my father working in the gardens of others. Further connecting to histories of Palo Alto, I included a municipal map of the Lawrence Tract, currently known as Lawrence Lane, a Palo Alto cul-de-sac built in the 1950s. With this project, the local Fair Play Council embarked on a radical social experiment, creating an intentionally integrated housing community at a time when racial segregation was the norm. The Lawrence Tract used the same mechanisms that were typically used in the service of discrimination, to ensure ongoing integration of the neighborhood.
This cul-de-sac is also where I grew up. The values that the Lawrence Tract attempted to embody—radical in their time—are emblematic of the region’s stated aspirational progressive values, it reflects the ways it falls short of reaching them as the shortage of affordable housing continues in California. Using material and conceptual tools developed over the last twenty years of artmaking, I dove deeply into The Enchanted Garden to create an experience that is conceptually and formally integrative and immersive, inviting viewers into a site-specific exploration of home, history, and belonging.
