Without exception, each time I visit our own manicured and beatific State Botanical Garden on South Milledge, I ask myself why is it exactly that I don’t conduct more of my daily life there. Why don’t I come here in the mornings to read the paper? Why don’t I exclusively jog on these trails? Can I think of a solid reason not to start eating three meals a day at Donderos’ Kitchen, tucked snugly inside a two-story greenhouse just off the Visitor’s Center? I’m a fan, if that’s not immediately obvious. And after my most recent trip out to the Garden, to see Hannah Skoonberg’s generous exhibition of prints currently on display, I’m now convinced that this may be the most calming, gorgeous venue in which to display work of this kind.
Skoonberg’s show is hung in a tucked-away corner of the Visitor’s Center and Conservatory, catty-corner to the café and opposite a gigantic indoor palm tree (can’t miss it!). The work, all framed prints—mostly relief and on Japanese paper—primarily concern themselves with landscape, although the range of techniques and compositional strategies at work here separates the 20-something pieces on display into distinct sub-sets, like paragraphs onto a page. The most distinctive of these is Skoonberg’s 10-part suite “My Mother’s Garden,†which riffs on traditional botanical illustration and the practice of pressing living specimens between paper as a means of preservation. In these, Skoonberg begins with a carved linoleum representation of plant life drawn directly from her own mother’s garden. Equal parts attentive and economical, Skoonberg’s skill as a printmaker is foregrounded by her consistently successful description of form through a sophisticated layering of saturated color, much of the time (and mercifully) avoiding black as a means of fixing the image too solidly onto the page. The results are delicately composed images, whose carefully considered layers cling to one another with a slight tension, as well as a vague undercurrent of ephemerality (not unlike the botanical subjects themselves). This may sound like a weak spot in her practice, but Skoonberg’s got the chops to build her house on sand. Cut from the page and pressed under glass, the seeming meekness of the work is preserved and highlighted for a viewer, labeled with hand-typed print in the bottom corner. I was, and remain, charmed.
As I made my way around the show, however, it became clear that this was a warm-up act. “City Trees,†one of the more recent pieces on display, utilizes the time-honored apposition of organic against geometric, of nuanced detail against rigid pattern, of unexpected points of view. In short, this piece does everything right. It also introduces other weapons in Skoonberg’s arsenal: her unflagging and often staggering attention to miniscule details, and a near-spooky ability to successfully articulate them every time, all of the time. Set against a nondescript office building and parking garage, an ecstatically executed tree blooms like a river breaking into streams. The depiction of organic matter in art is often an occasion for elaboration and/or outright invention, but throughout the show, Skoonberg walks a straight line between high realism and simplification—forming each tiny network of branches and limbs while (for the most part) omitting any description of surface. The results are complex, graphically striking silhouettes that blend, fade and resist the various contexts Skoonberg devises for them. “Blackwell†and the jaw-droppingly detailed “Night Descends†(two of the largest pieces in the show) are carved and printed on a scale directly related to that of the human body: the vertical orientation and relative width of the pieces are roughly the size of torsos. At this size, the dense optical networks created by the artist’s considerable focus are given ample platform upon which to sing—and sing is exactly what they do. Inside the edges, Skoonberg’s skittering, manic branches evoke lungs, nerves, blood vessels, streams and so on, and so on, and so on….
As dizzying as this detail can be, several of Skoonberg’s pieces rely on a mood conjured by sophisticated color decisions, as well as sustained attention to the craft of printing images by hand. “Stillness” and “Meditation” layer transparent layers atop the warm ground of Japanese paper, depicting Georgia landscapes with Eastern sensibilities, but with a voice so specific and misty it feels like looking at your own dreams.
Hannah Skoonberg’s exhibition is on display at the State Botanical Garden of Georgia through June 17. Hung in the Visitor’s Center and Conservatory, hours are Tuesdays through Saturday from 9 a.m.–4:30 p.m. (with late nights on Tuesdays until 8:30), and Sundays from 11:30 a.m until 4:30 p.m. The Garden is closed on Mondays, presumably for watering.
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