Ann Pizer: Folly: The Natural Order, Ann Pizer, and Folly

Ann Pizer: Folly: The Natural Order

Women & Their Work Gallery,

through September 9

To prune or not to prune. That is the question that has bedeviled gardeners since the day Adam first noticed the shrubs in Eden were looking a little ragged. We have an impulse toward order, we humans, and we insist on imposing it upon the world around us. Straighten this, flatten that, trim this into a nice little bowl shape. Our inclination to organize, to arrange, to shape, often results in forms that please the eye, but when it leads us to order nature, to mold and model that which is inherently wild, the aesthetic delights we derive from our handiwork are undercut by the understanding that what we're doing is, well, unnatural. The trees, the hedges, and the grass do not grow for us. They belong to themselves and have shapes of their own they are meant to develop. We know this, and we know that the shapes of nature have their own beauty, a beauty we are fools to tamper with. And yet, we think, if we could just nip that one scraggly branch ...

A sense of our ambivalence toward the sculpted loveliness of formal gardens runs silently through the 16 color photographs that comprise "Folly," an exhibition of images by Ann Pizer. In each work, Pizer presents an area of a carefully maintained garden, reverently showcasing its shrubbery, meticulously modeled into cylinders and spheres and sweetly rounded animals; its lawn, neatly trimmed into a carpet of green; its blooms, cultivated into bouquets. The ordered foliage is always prominent, the focus of the image, but in each work Pizer is also careful to show some part of untamed nature: lushly leafed trees in the distance, a thatch of uncut grass at the garden's edge, a bird winging its way blurrily across the frame. It is these often subtly offered intrusions by the wild world into the scenes' manufactured environments that give Pizer's photos their tension (and not a little of their humor). No sooner have we sighed in admiration at the artful shaping of vegetation in one image than the glimpse of unmanaged foliage reminds us of the true state of these things -- the natural order, and the beauty therein. Chastened by that, we come to see the fastidiousness of the formal gardens in a comical light, as in the photograph of a line of pruned bushes which resemble giant thumbs or pencil points erupting from the ground, and we grasp the meaning of the exhibition's title. And yet, if we continue to linger on the image, that old propensity toward order reasserts itself and we see again something genuinely pleasing in those shaved lawns and purposefully placed flowers: the clean lines, the care, the composition, the discipline. "Okay, it's silly," we think, "but I still like it." And back and forth we go.

It's unlikely that Pizer could inspire such a complex response without some real affection for her subject. An essay on the exhibit by Stephanie Hanor and Annette DiMeo Carlozzi indicates that Pizer has been fascinated with topiary since her childhood and took these photographs in an attempt to capture on film some of the feeling that these manicured gardens inspired in her years ago. Her fondness is evident in every image, in the way she shoots from a distance that seems almost respectful, in the way she composes the images -- with the subject just above or below and just to the left or right of the center of the frame, a horizontal line that appears low in the frame of many images, setting the foreground, a smallish, ragged patch of sky setting the background and providing contrast to the abundant greenery, the subdued, muted quality to the light -- which suggests a formality in keeping with that of the gardens. Pizer does capture some sense of the magic in these gardens, the magic of shapes and human ingenuity and of plants that seem possessed of character, so that even when these exercises in hubris and frivolity are exposed for what they are, we still want to walk through them, to gaze at their unnatural wonders.

So which will it be: the order of the garden or the chaos of the field and forest? After walking us through more than a dozen environments where the carefully cultivated greenery dominates, where she's played to our deeply ingrained desire for order, Pizer leaves us in a place where the question may seem tougher than ever. In the choice final photograph, titled Alley, two sculpted pillar-like plants create an entryway into a shadowy wood, a wild world where all the greenery is untouched by human hands. Thick with trees and leafy undergrowth and an enticing darkness, it beckons us, as freedom always will.