Variety Garden | Lukas Geronimas

Variety Garden is a place, a preference, and a style. Think of it as a state of mind. You’re a painter by trade, let’s say, but your passion is horticulture. At a party, you roll your eyes at the guy listing off every French painter who painted a garden, or while in a garden, but then you recall the first time you saw Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights and can’t help but smile. Australian singer-songwriter Courtney Barnett’s “Avant Gardener” is playing on the radio during the ride home. “I was never good at smoking bongs, I’m not that good at breathing in.” Maybe you don't care much for gardening but believe landscape architecture is art. Going to parks just to pay attention to their design becomes a pastime. You visit Versailles but never make it inside. 

Variety Garden is in Rodney Graham’s “The “Phonokinetoscope.” Not necessarily the entire installation, from 2001, but its short film. The artist’s summer afternoon in the Tiergarten, in Berlin. “From the land that time forgot, I just lost my train of thought,” softly sing the lyrics of the soundtrack, also created by the artist. “You’re the kinda girl that fits in with my world,” he repetitively croons. As the song ramps up from folky acoustic guitar to heavy rock’n’roll, Graham places a tab of LSD on his tongue. There is a spring-loaded clothespin in the grass, as well as a playing card - the Queen of Diamonds. Trippy. Graham proceeds to ride his bicycle through the park, cycling his vintage Fischer Original across the grass, through lying bodies sunning in the park, and into the verdant trees. The playing card is clamped to the bicycle’s fender, flickering through the spokes of the wheel as it spins and spins. 

Variety Garden is fragmentation and hybridization. It is a process that is a privilege. An unfinished unknown that is an adventure and a craft, letting go of ideals while letting content flow freely. Cycling around a lagoon, around and around, cycling about themes and content, coming back to the same old place that may make it a new place after all. Rodney dismounts his bike and gazes upwards at the public art, the Prussian Queen Louise, gowned atop a pedestal wrapped with a frieze depicting the queen’s charity to the poor. Two joggers run past. “Who is it that does not love a tree?” the lyrics ask as the artist rides backwards on the bike, across a bridge, à la the Sundance Kid. Variety Garden is paradigm shifts, vision quests, walkabouts and spiritual awakenings. Organic, it is growth and decay. Putting things together by letting them put themselves together. Support with fasteners and adhesives. Remembering that all things are living things that live and die. Think of it as a state of mind. 

TC Art Week Event Saturday September 30th Noon-2PM
Enjoy pancakes and view Lukas Geronimas’ exhibition Variety Garden.

 Editor's Note: This exhibition is one of many during the 2nd Twin Cities Art Week September 27th - October 1st. View the full list of Twin Cities Art Week Events.

About the Artist
Lukas Geronimas (b. 1980 in Toronto, Canada, lives and works in Los Angeles, CA) employs painstaking attention to detail and the highest level of craft to create otherworldly sculptures that call into question preconceived notions of materiality and useful form. His work often contains found or gifted material that is obsessively reconditioned to become unrecognizable from its original state. It is through this alchemical process that his forms find meaning. Recent solo exhibitions include those held at Parker Gallery, Los Angeles (2022) and the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (2021). This is Lukas’s second solo exhibition with David Petersen Gallery.

Gallery Hours:

Friday - Sunday 12-5pm 

Image: Lukas Geronimas, (Many) Aspects of a Garden Path, with Garden Window, 2023, Marker, paper, plexiglas, fasteners and adhesives dimensions variable