I definitely felt like there was a nod to the choice to explore questions of nature and queerness in a meticulously manicured garden on the edge of one of the country’s most densely populated cities. In two separate shows at Wave Hill Public Garden & Cultural Center, Ruben Natal-San Miguel: Nature finds a way And Perfect Trouble: Nature Culture in a Strange Worldboth curated by Rachel Raphaela Gugelberger, Gabriel de Guzman and Afriti Bankwalla, the artists resist and work against expectations of what the ‘natural’ entails, with the shows’ settings adding real depth to the conversation.
Installation view, Perfect Trouble: Queering Natureculture, multi-artist, curated by Gabriel de Guzman and Afriti Bankwalla, Wave Hill Public Garden & Cultural Center, April 20-August 11, 2024 (all photos Alexis Clements/Hyperallergic)
The setting for that conversation is not New York City in general, but the Bronx specifically. A borough defined by its complexity and contradiction, the Bronx is notorious for Riker’s Island, persistent poverty, and high rates of asthma exacerbated by poor air quality, but it’s also celebrated for birthing hip-hop culture, nurturing prominent street artists, and helping to shape Latin American culture in the United States. Many readers will be surprised to learn that it’s also the borough with the most green space and is home to the oldest untouched forest in the entire state.
Queerness, a central theme in both shows, is also complex and contradictory. Queer culture is often associated with highly developed urban areas (New York City is home to the largest LGBTQ+ population of any major metropolitan area in the US), and yet queer people live in every conceivable environment. Add to that the longstanding and virulent false claims that LGBTQ+ people are somehow “unnatural” (despite a growing body of research confirming that variation in gender and sexuality are very natural phenomena), and a certain amount of excitement about the relationship between queerness and the natural world is unsurprising.
Ruben Natal-San Miguel, “Immigrant Flower Stand Owner (23 years old)” (2019), dye sublimation on aluminum photo
Visit these two exhibitions.
The witty photo series of Ruben Natal-San Miguel, Nature finds a waystands out for its sense of humor and camp, along with its direct challenge to social conventions meant to limit who can claim a relationship with the “natural,” and how. The work foregrounds queer and trans people, as well as people of color. No conversation about what nature means today would be complete without discussing race, given the persistent disparities in who has access to or feels comfortable in green spaces, along with significant contemporary efforts to counteract those disparities.
These photographs highlight a bitter irony: The Bronx has the largest BIPOC population of the five boroughs, with a Latino majority made up largely of Puerto Rican and Dominican immigrants and their descendants. As such, Bronx residents of color often have deep ties to parts of the world where it’s much easier to leave the built environment than it is in New York. In one of my favorite photographs, “It All Comes Out in the Wash (Nykki)” (2019), we find ourselves in a laundromat, the machines decorated with bright floral motifs. The subject, Nykki, holds open a washing machine door, simultaneously posing and beckoning us into the machine. In another, a flower seller peers out the sliding doors of her stall, holding cellophane-wrapped bunches of carnations dyed in artificial shades of blue, purple, and green. And in a grouping of four photographs, the subjects adorn themselves with wigs, tattoos, flags, and a plastic octopus, each a synthetic representation of a “real” object, being, or concept. The photographs do not question who needs or wants to be near natural forms and greener spaces (these are fundamental human needs), but rather acknowledge the competing needs, desires, and realities that so many people must juggle. Here we see adaptation and a refusal to give up a relationship with nature.
Christopher Udemezue, “and she said…” “sonje figi sa a…” (2024), C-print
Perfect Trouble: Nature Culture in a Strange World feels more mixed overall, but the context and curatorial questions pull the experience together. In Erin Johnson’s video piece, “There Are Things in This World That Are Yet to Be Named” (2020), a group of botanists from the Huntington Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California, study a rare Australian bush tomato species (solanum plastisexum), a plant that defies easy categorization because it lacks a stable or unique sexual expression. As the camera pans through the garden spaces (similar to parts of Wave Hill), we see scientists trying to understand something that defies current categories of plant biology. The video’s narration includes excerpts from letters by author Rachel Carson (who raised the alarm about environmental destruction with her 1962 book Silent spring) to her lover, Dorothy Freeman. The letters are filled with longing, to feel both connected and understood.
Seba Calfuqueo’s photographs and videos challenge all sorts of barriers and boundaries: the separation of humans and nonhumans, the use and adaptation of native and non-native species, and whether perpetually flowing water can constitute a territory. The latter is especially relevant because Calfuqueo’s traditional Mapuche lands, Wallmapu, cover parts of present-day southern Chile, a country whose government under dictator Augusto Pinochet created an ongoing water crisis by privatizing water. Christopher Udemezue’s photographs, often in sculptural frames, evoke ritual, sex, desire, and secrecy in plant-filled spaces. where the boundaries between bodies, plants, earth and sacred actions are intertwined. Udemezue’s works invite and challenge the viewer’s gaze: What are you looking at? Is it for you? And what can you really know about what is happening here?
Installation view, Erin Johnson, “There are things in this world that have yet to be named” (2020), video
Rachel Youn’s kinetic sculptures address some of the same themes as Ruben Natal-San Miguel’s work, but with a much drier sense of humor. Plastic flowers jiggle and bump uneasily against each other, moving at the command of deconstructed machines like the “masseur,” a handheld massager produced for consumers in the 1990s. The false intimacy, mechanical stimulation, and simulated nature of the plastic flowers evoke so much, from the ubiquity of street-level massage parlors to the repetitive monotony of dating apps, the popularization of “self-care” over collective care, and the existential isolation caused by poor imitations of desirable human contact. Within the context of this show, Youn’s sculptures seem to sow doubt about the question of the natural by teasing us with hints of how much effort, money, and petroleum we expend to create or experience artificial realities.
Whenever I see the word “queering” applied to anything these days, I often groan. It’s a term that, in its overuse and capriciousness, has become largely meaningless. I prefer to stay rooted in its core meanings: acknowledging expanded sexualities and transcending a binary understanding of gender, and refusing biological boundaries to kinship. From this perspective, I find these two shows offer much to consider, particularly as a lens through which to reexamine the very well-tended “nature” of Wave Hill itself. Most obviously, the work challenges binaries such as natural/unnatural or domestic/wild, but what struck me most after my visit was our culture’s continued desire for, or belief in, a “pure” form of nature — just as some believe in “pure” bodies, or types of sex and love. There is no place left on earth that has not been touched by humans, and many of the areas we consider natural or wild, such as national parks or nature reserves, are in fact subject to massive human intervention. Together, the exhibitions and artworks, as well as Wave Hill and the Bronx, cast a critical eye on our fantasy of nature as it collides with the reality of the world we humans have created.
Installation image of Perfect Trouble: Nature Culture in a Strange World at Wave Hill 
Rachel Youn, “Sexy but not joyous” (2022), shiatsu massager, artificial flowers and broken tire jack 
Seba Calefuqueo, “Simbiosis” (2021), digital photo on Hahnemuhle Fine Art Baryta paper 
Installation image of Perfect Trouble: Nature Culture in a Strange World at Wave Hill
Ruben Natal-San Miguel: Nature finds a way And Perfect Trouble: Nature Culture in a Strange World The exhibitions will be on view at Wave Hill Public Garden & Cultural Center (4900 Independence Avenue, Bronx, New York) through August 11. The exhibitions are curated by Rachel Raphaela Gugelberger, Gabriel de Guzman, and Afriti Bankwalla.
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