Ben Sanders and Wentrcek Zebulon – Cultivars

Marta presents Cultivars, a dual exhibition by Pasadena-based artist Ben Sanders and New York-based duo Kristen Wentrcek & Andrew Zebulon exploring fantasies of botanical expression. About Marta presents Cultivars, a dual exhibition of work by Pasadena-based artist and teacher Ben Sanders and New York-based artist duo Kristen Wentrcek & Andrew Zebulon. Titled after plants that are selected, cultivated, and then bred based on desired traits, this confluence of work—twenty-four works on paper from Sanders and nine functional-decorative works from Wentrcek & Zebulon—examines fantasies of botanical expression through form, material, and display. Framed drawings from Sanders establish the exhibition's perimeter, enclosing the space with bonsai trees on gallery letterhead from Gagosian Beverly Hills and the former Blum & Poe. Rendered in Tombow Dual Brush Pens, each tree, either potted or free-standing, is an imaginative construction, recognizable with limbs and foliage but definitively not drawn from life. At the time of execution, the series represented a specific fantasy for the artist: bonsai, the art of growing and shaping trees in containers, is a notoriously labor-intensive practice; a demand on one's time that wasn't realistic for Sanders at that stage of his life. Instead, he amassed his arboreal collection through drawing. Made during the hours while his young children napped, he accelerated their cultivation through to their final form, rich in color but minimal in palette, each an exploration in one, two, or three colors. With curved and jagged trunks, spherical and cloud-like leafage, Sanders' trees are a time capsule, representative of a period in the artist's life that has since evolved to include a garden of live bonsai. What was once a chimera is now an inhabited reality—a co-existence of life that reifies the possibilities of our dreams and embodies the value of what the artist refers to as "the optimism of constant adaptation." Within Sanders' border lies another delineation—the U-shaped formation of foam stools and benches from Kristen Wentrcek & Andrew Zebulon. Each of these works' faceted surfaces bring the functional deeper into the sculptural, their pure black coatings affirming an objecthood to which we are inexorably pulled. From their perch we sit to view the pedestal before us, supporting five tinted glass boxes on wooden bases that hold arrangements of crepe paper flowers threaded through with fiber optic cables. Lit without operating as a source of outward illumination, the artists use fiber optic colored light to orient these works inward, channeling their focus to the botanical specimens at their center, growing profusely within the infinite reflection created by the use of two-way mirrored glass. Drawing on the typologies of roadside altars, memorials, and shrines, the artists' works derive resonance from the rudimentary, often highly accessible, nature of these constructions, which establish presence through ceremony and memory rather than luxury and economy. By embracing the mechanisms of kitsch, Wentrcek & Zebulon celebrate their chosen subject by focusing on the value of their essence instead of their physical materiality. Here, it is life everlasting—a curio offering flowers that need no sun, no water, no air; that will exist, eternally, at the apex of their bloom. Sanders, too, provides access to this realm, envisioning an ancient practice of cultivation through static imagery that declares a lasting claim to life. — Maya Bushell Read more Toggle Drawing Installation Sculpture Design / Fashion