This article is part of the museum's special section about how museums strive to offer visitors even more to see, do, and feel.
Rabbits are often seen at the New York Botanical Garden. But what the public will soon see there is not the typical little brown cottontail. The approximately 12-foot-tall creature carries a pocket watch and wears fur made of cream-colored sedum leaves, a yellow-green sedum vest, and a maroon jacket made of alternantella leaves.
But he won't be late for a very important date. Created by the Canadian company Mosaïcultures Internationales de Montréal, the White Rabbit is part of the exhibition Wonderland: The Curious, inspired by Lewis Carroll's books Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking. It will be in time for the May 18th celebratory opening of “Nature.'' Glass, and what Alice found there. ”
The garden staff hope that what visitors discover is their own adventure.
In the exhibition, “you are made aware of and drawn into something outside of your everyday experience,” said Jennifer R. Gross, the exhibition's guest curator, during a behind-the-scenes visit with the project's creative team. Told. She added that for children as well as adults, the spectacle offers “a variety of enjoyable and calming moments.”
That soothing unease occurs indoors and outdoors in this public garden in the Bronx, as this exhibition explores Carroll's fictional and real worlds through fantastical plants, Victorian artifacts, and contemporary art. To do.
Overlooking the Rockefeller Rose Garden, Yoko Ono's large-scale interactive chess set “Play It by Trust'' (1966/2011) recalls the living chess pieces from “Through the Looking Glass,'' but its oars The white form allows for virtual competitive play. impossible.
“That it's about peace and not having to win but navigating a space together seemed really poignant to me at this particular time,” Gross said. Ta.
Near the garden's Tyne Family Forest is Brooklyn artist Alison Schotz's site-specific sculpture “A World Made of Time,” a nine-foot-tall sculpture made of about 200 pieces of polished stainless steel. It is made up of mirrors and is suspended from a standing armature in the shape of a tree. Sparkling curtains.
“Both books have strange bends in time and space,” Schotz said in a video interview, adding that he wants his work to “look like a portal.”
Visitors pass through a real portal inside the Haupt Conservatory. There, the garden has built a giant rabbit hole of tree stumps, roots, and vines. This passage takes us from a botanical section that mathematician Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, aka Lewis Carroll, himself would have encountered, to a much wilder space called the Wonderland Garden.
“A lot of the things I was looking for didn't look real,” said Marc Ashadourian, the garden's glasshouse horticulture director and senior curator. “And you have to stop and ask yourself: Does the color look unnatural? Does the shape of the plant seem unnatural? There is a sense of curiosity that makes you want to stop and interact. there is.”
He pointed out specimens such as begonias with spots that look like they were scribbled on by a dizzy scribbler and African daisies whose color changes from white to deep purple over time. The rotating global array also includes the tassel fern, which Achadourian called a “living hula skirt,” and the rabbit fern, named for its fuzzy rhizomes.
There's a spooky side to Carroll's book, so visitors shouldn't be surprised to discover carnivorous plants and corpse flowers whose giant leaves resemble green tree trunks. It's unlikely that the flower will make its stinking bloom during the show, which runs until October 27, but another olfactory surprise awaits. It's a variety of geranium whose leaves smell exactly like lemons, a scent that deters hungry herbivores.
Achadoorian said this is an example of the exhibition's “potential to teach people about plant evolution and plant diversity.”
Scientific information on the show's labels also explains other oddities, such as the bulbous Southeast Asian ant plant (Myrmecodia tuberosa), which has a symbiotic relationship with the ants that live inside it. (However, there are no native insects in this garden specimen, as friendly as the Queen of Hearts was to Alice.)
The hundreds of plants featured on the show also include cup-and-saucer vines and parrot-beak flowers, which Carroll fans may recall from “Through the Looking Glass”'s talking flowers.
“Throughout the story, Alice encounters these creepy flowers that talk and move in an anthropomorphic way, so we touch on that as much as possible,” says the zoo's exhibits and programs. said Joanna L. Groark, Vice President.
That theme continues on the conservatory's topiary-filled lawn, which also features two 11-foot-tall moving mushroom sculptures, Schlumen Lumen, by international art group Foldhaus Collective. Ru. Made of aluminum and steel and covered in translucent hand-folded plastic, the sculpture incorporates colored LED lights that create vibrant hues and different patterns in the evening. The group's leaders, Jesse Silber and Jorg Student, explained that an internal motor moves each mushroom, rising about four feet before descending.
“There's a strange feeling standing under it and watching it grow,” Silver said. “It sure looks like it's shrinking a little.”
Alice herself often changes size in Wonderland. Her outdoor installation “Homegrown'' by London-based architect Andre Kong reflects her growing up moments until she almost bursts out of the White Rabbit's abode. Kong's 20-foot-tall half-timbered house alludes to the transforming mushroom that Alice eats. The brick wall, created by Kong's studio in collaboration with Ecovative, is made of a mixture of mycelium, the mycelium found underground in mushrooms, and hemp.
Inside a house with mushrooms growing, “it feels a little dizzy in a way because all the walls are tilted towards you and away from you,” Kong explained.
Other mushrooms with psychoactive properties are found within the garden's Merz Library, highlighting Carroll's historical and scientific influence. In addition to herbariums, exhibits include artifacts such as Charles' Darwin's books and papers, Victorian children's games, and amateur paintings of fungi.
“In the Victorian era, many of these new mind-altering plants were brought in from the edges of the empire,” said Michaela Wright, the garden's manager of interpretive content. She added, “At this point, there's a lot of self-experimentation that you associate with the 1960s, right? But actually, the Victorians were the first to do it.”
The hallucinatory nature of Carroll's books fascinated literary critics and artists alike. The library features contemporary art such as a giant mushroom sculpture by Carsten Heller, surreal videos by Beverly Semmes and Paula Wilson, miniature dioramas by Patrick Jacobs, and futuristic canvases by Agus Putu Suyadnya. The works will be exhibited. Photographer Abelardo Morel presents his own three-dimensional Alice scenes, based on images from the original book pages.
Through art, fanciful plants and public programming, the exhibition is designed to encourage visitors to take a leisurely look, Groark said.
“That’s the experience we’re trying to create, one that encourages you to ask more questions about the world,” she said. “And I think that's what Carol was doing.”