Volitia Returns
Planthouse Gallery, New York City
In a rowdy, reverse steamroll, Volitia returns in order to make her point, to undo a presupposed, solipsistic force-field with an earnest untangling of imperfect reflections.
Modeled after the warrior-princess’s secret plant room in Hayao Miyazaki’s 1984 anime, Nausicaä - Of the Valley of the Wind, the wall-drawing at Planthouse proposes growth where there should be none, demonstrating an adaptive response to an inhospitable environment and tainted ecosystem. Nausicaä, Miyazaki’s forthright hero, is a gifted communicator, acting on behalf of every flawed creature, human, bug, flower, boy, man, woman, child, warrior, King and Queen. Her plant room expresses an inventor’s instinct for survival and hard-won hope for the future.
"Plants, defined by their immobility, have evolved extraordinary life-ways by way of compensation, the power to regenerate after most of their body has been eaten; the ability to have sex by proxy; the possession of more than 20 senses whose delicacy far exceeds any of our own.” Richard Mabey, The Cabaret of Plants.
"Lily, for all her dissatisfied dreaming, had never really conceived the possibility of revolving around a different centre: it was easy enough to despise the world, but decidedly difficult to find any other habitable region.” Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth
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