Installation Review

September, 2010
"the bucket, the water, the well" Solo Installation, Flanders Gallery, Raleigh, NC
Review by Lauren Turner

"It was this hazy tangle from tree to tree which made it all look so mysterious."
- Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden, 1911

"Nothing could exceed the intentness with which this scientific gardener examined every
shrub which grew in his path; it seemed as if he was looking into their inmost nature,
making observations in regard to their creative essence, and discovering why one leaf
grew in this shape, and another in that, and wherefore such and such flowers differed
among themselves in hue and perfume. Nevertheless, in spite of the deep intelligence on
his part, there was no approach to intimacy between himself and these vegetable
existences. On the contrary, he avoided their actual touch, or the direct inhaling of their
odors, with a caution that impressed Giovanni most disagreeably; for the man's demeanor
was that of one walking among malignant influences, such as savage beasts, or deadly
snakes, or evil spirits, which, should he allow them one moment of license, would wreak
upon him some terrible fatality. It was strangely frightful to the young man's imagination,
to see this air of insecurity in a person cultivating a garden, that most simple and innocent
of human toils, and which had been alike the joy and labor of the unfallen parents of the
race. Was this garden, then, the Eden of the present world?--and this man, with such a
perception of harm in what his own hands caused to grow, was he the Adam?" - Nathaniel
Hawthorne, "Rappaccini's Daughter," 1844

"the bucket, the water, and the well" - it is a phrase that echoes the incantational power of
Catholicism's "bell, book, and candle." And well should it imitate the excommunicative
curse, that finality so often utilized to divorce spiritual canon from personal experience and
exploration. Kenn Kotara's ethereal drawings, paintings, and mobiles continue a tradition
of surveying one's innermost and outermost worlds by surrounding himself with pleasing
aesthetics, oftentimes resulting in both revelatory and unsettling discoveries.

Upon entering a gallery installation of Kotara's works, one is immediately reminded of
landscape design's "il giardino segreto" ("the secret garden"). Be it Kotara's semitransparent
cut-wire screens - intentionally evocative of Spanish moss - or his blooming,
fractal-like drawings, the space invites the viewer to discover and explore abstracted
naturalistic imagery. However, in his clever framing of paintings - such as the layered oval
windows tightly cropping out wider views in Conspicuous Crepuscular Bioluminescence -
and the smudged areas of his intricately detailed works on paper, the presentation has the
calculated effect of leaving visitors continuing to search and feeling like the keystone of
comprehension is just beyond their grasp. Additionally, the layered treatment of lines in
many of his paintings builds up a haze by using one opaque layer after another. Because
this journey occurs within a walled, enclosed space and includes delicately floral-like
abstract designs, it very fittingly gives the impression of a secret garden.

The secret garden, while typically describing walled enclosures within the history of
garden design, had its most conceptual grounding in Renaissance Italy. Then it would
have been one of the last areas of a garden to be admired, should the wanderer even be
permitted within its perimeter. Its purpose was to serve as a sanctuary for noblemen that
afforded the peace necessary for humanistic introspection. While it would seem to be the
happy center for the kind of holistic healing espoused by Burnett in The Secret Garden, it
was the place where philosophies of all kinds could take root, whether the sermons of the
Church, or the instructions of Machiavelli. It could provide fertile soil for all ideas,
regardless of their moral implications.

Admittedly, should one consider only Kotara's abstract paintings, screens, and drawings
on view, then this comparison would seem a stretch of the imagination. It is that he
presents these alongside his Braille-based experiments in Minimalism that heightens the
sense of unchecked meditation of all senses, and not simply the visual. Minimalism can
suggest an aesthetic style celebrating physical properties divorced from a message.
Kotara's Braille works upend this expectation. For the seeing, these pieces do pass as
studies of dots on richly colored and textured papers. For those proficient in reading
Braille, they present classics of Western literature like Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven." The
content of these pieces becomes immediately apparent: It is mankind's attempt to come to
terms with the good and bad of his world. The very fact that the pieces have pointed
content disarms them of their Minimalism. They are studies in seeing beyond looking.
In other words, further meaning is always present in one's surroundings for those who are
willing to look beyond their limited scope of experience and senses. The garden, like art,
can be more than its arrangement; it is its odors, sounds, and textures as well. Also, one
cannot simply learn about a plant's growth by observing it; he must also study, at potential
risk, everything that makes up its being, even the water that came from the well and its
bucket.