"The Secret Life of Plants" at Freight and Volume

The Freight and Volume gallery on the Lower East Side is currently presenting a group exhibition entitled The Secret Life of Plants, inspired by a 1973 book of the same name by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird. The book theorized that plants have feelings and that their physical, emotional, and spiritual relationships with humans go beyond their obvious role in providing food and oxygen.

The works in the exhibition, which is co-curated by Jennifer Coates and Nick Lawrence, explore the relationship between plants, humans, and the psychology behind their interactions.

As climate change threatens Earth’s flora and fauna, connecting our minds to plants can help us see how they adjust to their environment. The show includes paintings, drawings, photographs, and other installations to illustrate plant and human relationships.

Paintings by Emilia Olsen and Alexis Rockman hint at the menace of a warming world. Rockman’s Wallace’s Vision depicts animals and insects in a liquid, melting landscape, and Olsen’s untitled desert scene shows a giant cactus with a woman sleeping next to a skeleton. 

Untitled by Emilia Olsen

On the other hand, David Humphrey and Daniel Heidkamp present a more dreamy, bucolic state of mind amidst vegetation.

Heidkamp’s Beast Bath, for instance, has a calming effect. With this painting, Heidkamp illustrates the harmonious environment of a garden with a birdbath with water showing the reflection of the plants and colorful flowers that surround it. Humphrey’s Plant Dreamer portrays a sleeping person having a pleasant dream of abstract trees with large, colorful leaves.

Flowers by Alec Egan

Alec Egan focuses on the beauty of plants. His painting simply entitled Flowers is set against a muted background of gray and white stripes. The painting is a still-life of a vase decorated with sharp black and white zigzag patterns, holding an assortment of vibrant plum-colored flowers each of which has a pastel yellow stripe in the center.

Peter Hutchinson shows how plants provide food with his installation entitled The Red and the Black, which consists of small tubes containing American red currants and French black currants.

Also of note is Sangram Majumdar’s painting Paper Tree. His inspiration for this work came from a tree with perfectly trimmed leaves in a well-maintained garden that Majumdar saw in India amidst an area of ruins. He says, “I recreated it using colored craft paper on my studio wall, thinking about how the same tool, the scissor, can be used to both trim a tree perfectly, or turn its leaves into basic triangles. The painting is a depiction of this process, of remaking and reassembling. The light at the top is both the sun and spotlight illuminating.”

At Freight and Volume, 97 Allen St., through Sep. 3. The gallery is open Wed.-Sun. from 11 a.m.-6 p.m.