Worth A Look: Meticulous flora at Public Functionary and Night Club

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"Worth a Look" is a series of semi-regular essays about excellent art, interesting ideas, and whatever other cool stuff we find around town. Go see art; it's good for you.

It’s kind of wild how we move through this life acting like plants are a totally normal thing. We just take it for granted that these living beings use dirt, water, and sunshine to grow — from seed — into foods and medicines and poisons and artful arrangements. They’re vibrant, magical, hardcore motherfuckers that live outside all year long, balance out ecosystems, produce oxygen, and can swallow up whole buildings if left unattended. And we walk around like of course they do; why wouldn’t they?

We don’t even grant them the assumption of consciousness, thinking of them as alive but not awake. Yet when we talk to our plants, they do better. And when we have plants in our own lives, we do better — even if they’re fake, it turns out. Makes me wonder how much impact mere pictures of plants could have on us, and there are two shows up right now, coincidentally, that could help test the hypothesis. Both call on the greener kingdom for inspiration, using plants as an allegory for and an abstraction of our lofty troubles up here in class Mammalia.

The first is Nell Pierce’s Coming In, on view in Public Functionary’s main gallery space on the first floor of the Northrup King Building. If you've never been before, enter under the black PF sign around the corner from Find Furnish, across from NKB’s main entrance, and the main gallery is just past their café. (Not many galleries have a coffee shop attached, but it’s a winning combination for all of us underslept art-lovers.) 

The gallery itself is spacious and stately in the way that these old factory buildings can be, with the steady symmetry of thick wooden beams and years of scuff on the floorboards. The place cleans up real nice. Pierce’s works are quite large, but here they have plenty of room to breathe. 

 

Installation view of Coming In at Public Functionary's main gallery 144.

 

At first, you notice the people: larger than life and incredibly rendered in collage. Their faces have been intricately constructed with hundreds of small pieces of hand-cut paper — little snippets of magazine photography and graphic design that have been utterly deconstructed and isolated by color and texture. Pierce uses scraps of paper like brushstrokes, building shape and shadow out of countless little morsels of precisely placed color. Even more impressive, at least to someone who spent most of my high school years making collages out of old National Geographics, is imagining what kind of organizational system Pierce must have in place before the artwork even begins, sorting this immense amount of source material into a workable palette. These anonymous, found images have been stripped down to their simplest elements and reconstituted here as new images of people from the artist’s queer community. 

The portraits are grounded in realism and in the emotions these people convey. Their settings, however, feel more fantastical & metaphorical — and lush with plantlife. These folks are surrounded by them, finding community in and among plants, sometimes getting nearly engulfed by them. A variety of species populate the desert in between sitters or spring out of the dirt underneath dancers, each one as meticulously observed and recreated as the humans in these super-natural landscapes. The wall text lets us in: the plants are the whole point. They are the inspiration for these moments of rest, joy, and affirmation. Next to the desert scene, Boundaries, the text reads “Like succulents, we have to self-preserve to navigate environments that do not give us the nourishment we need.” Another: “There are as many ways to embody and express gender as there are plant species in the world.” In the accompanying book that the artist published to document the works and collect the stories of their sitters, the didactic on each piece lists the names of both the people and the plants involved. All parties played a role here.

 

Top: Nell Pierce, Abundance (detail), 2023. Cut up magazine with accents of acrylic paint on acrylic-stained wood, 12’ x 4’. Bottom: Nell Pierce, The Whole Truth, 2022. Cut up magazine on acrylic-painted wood 5’x4’.

 

If you’re so inspired, Pierce and PF have even set up a worktable in the gallery with all the supplies you’ll need to grow your own collages. I’m telling you: it’s so much fun. When you visit, see if you can’t set aside some time to sit down and sift through the magazines they have laid out for you. It’s a rewarding process, hunting down visual moments from other artists, other editors, and other times and mashing them all together into something brand new.

 

Fidencio Fifield-Perez, The Garden, 2023. Acrylic on canvas, 58 x 56".

 

A few miles away, in a similarly empty old commercial space — this one a former convenience store in downtown Saint Paul that has been stripped to bare concrete and plaster — another collection of plant life is flourishing. Unlike Pierce, Fidencio Fifield-Perez has set his focus on the indoors instead, here presenting a beautiful collection of lovingly painted potted plants. Far Away Is Still Somewhere, at Night Club Gallery, includes two distinct series: the first, nearly two dozen of Fifield-Perez’s dacaments, featuring individual houseplants painted photorealistically onto used postal envelopes; and the second, large weavings made of thin paper strips that have been coated in blue and green intaglio ink, creating low-relief patterns of abstracted fences, water droplets, and the broad familiar leaves of ficus and philodendron. 

The dacaments series draws on the artist’s experience navigating the American immigration system, having to prove his position in this place through postmarked envelopes to his home address and then, in turn, having to wait for the slow replies from the government to show up in the mail. All the while, these potted plants sat growing and living in their transitory homes as well — both constant companions to Fifield-Perez and stand-ins for the migrant experience. The largest and newest piece in the show is a five-foot-tall painting looking into the back of a U-Haul truck packed to the gills with plants. It’s based on a photo the artist took before relocating to Minnesota, as though you’re about to close the sliding door on one of Rousseau’s own thick jungles. The attention to detail is astounding, and as with Pierce’s collages, enjoying these paintings purely for their formal precision is worth the trip alone.

 

Top: Fidencio Fifield-Perez, dacament, Acrylic on envelope. Bottom: Fidencio Fifield-Perez, Far Away Is Still Somewhere, 2023.Intaglio ink on woven paper, 37.5” x 57”.

 

That you leave with even more to think about is the real gift. Compare, for instance, the optical illusions created by Fifield-Perez’s abstracted weavings to the optical illusion of his trompe l’oeil realism. Or hold up the love and empathy in one of the plant portraits against the grinding inhumanity of our immigration system. Let alone, then, what it took for each of us, individually, to be here in this place, on this land, living this life. There’s a certain luck and luxury to the fact that both of these art exhibitions take place in old utilitarian spaces — a former grain distributor dressed up with drywall and track lights and a convenience store stripped down nearly to its bare, blemished bones. It calls to mind glorious flowering weeds pushing up through cracks in the concrete or, in the case of Public Functionary, setting down strong roots that might shift the slabs themselves. “Like weeds,” reads one of Pierce’s texts, “we resist and create in small ways that can cumulatively transform our environment.”

It’s a lofty goal, but as anyone who has ever planted a seed or finished a painting will tell you, you gotta start somewhere. Gratitude is the water, and this community is the sunshine. That both of these shows occur during Pride month and as the queer community faces cultural and legislative attacks at an increasingly fevered pitch only underscores the importance of this work. The bigots like to claim that LGBTQIA2S+ folks are living an "unnatural lifestyle." The truth is, nature is queer as hell and all the more beautiful because of it. ◼︎

 

Nell Pierce: Coming In is on view at Public Functionary through July 1. You can see more of the artist's work on their website or on Instagram @nellpierce.

There will be an Artist & Participant Conversation for Coming In this Thursday, June 22, at 6:30pm. Also on view in their second floor gallery is Lissa Karpeh's Sense of Belonging.

Fidencio Fifield-Perez: Far Away Is Still Somewhere is on view at Night Club Gallery through July 22. You can see more of the artist's work on his website or on Instagram @fidencio.f.perez.

All images taken by the author.

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This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund. 

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