Roses is a window installation by Denise Schatz inspired by her new publication of the same name with Ariel Dill, published by Miniature Garden. The installation is on view through Sunday, October 8th. Roses (the book!) is available to purchase online or in-store.
Join us Saturday, September 30th 3-5PM for an outdoor book signing and some love letter writing <3
A rose is a prickly bush or shrub that typically bears red, pink, yellow, or white fragrant flowers, native to north temperate regions. There are numerous hybrids and cultivars that have been developed and are widely grown as ornamental. They are given names like Michelangelo, Rhapsody in Blue, and Amala. The paintings presented in Roses came about while Ariel Dill watched her mother, the artist Ann Thronycroft, nurture her rose garden. Tending to the fragility and strength of the rose and its variations is a seasonal puzzle. Roses are inextricably linked to romantic love, transcendence, death, purity, religion, and are tended to by devoted gardeners like Ann. But roses also carry cultural connotations counter to these more serious associations; more winsome depictions of roses—rendered perhaps in ceramic knick knacks, wallpaper, or clothing—transform them into symbols of cuteness, whimsy, or even frivolity. The images of such trinkets in Roses (roses on little cats, roses on a bell, roses on seashells, roses with a hummingbird, roses in the palm of a hand) were all collected by Denise Schatz from Ebay auction listings. Extracted from their source and re-situated as concrete counterbalances to the abstraction of Dill’s paintings, the objects take on an eerie—almost haunting—quality.
This window installation features Roses alongside the objects and artworks that live in its pages. An image index made physical, the display encourages viewers to consider what happens to things when we translate their likenesses into bookform, to lean into the weirdness of cultural fixations with and attraction to objects, and—of course—to stop and smell the flowers.
Denise Schatz was born in Los Angeles, CA and lives in New York, NY. She received an MFA in 2007 and BFA in 2004 from Hunter College in New York, NY, and a BA in 1998 from San Francisco State University, San Francisco, CA. She began the small press Miniature Garden in 2008, with a focus on collaborative and individual artist books. Miniature Garden publications have been exhibited widely through the mentorship of Printed Matter. Schatz has participated in Printed Matter’s Art Book Fairs since 2010. Miniature Garden books are in the collection of the New York Public Library, Brooklyn Museum Library, San Francisco MOMA library, and the New York MOMA library.
Ariel Dill was born in Los Angeles, CA, in 1976, where she lives and works. She earned her BA from Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY, in 1998 and her MFA from Hunter College, New York, NY, in 2006. Dill has mounted recent solo exhibitions at LADIES’ ROOM, Los Angeles, CA (2021); Safe Gallery, Brooklyn, NY (2016); Turn Gallery, New York, NY (2016); and Southfirst Gallery, Brooklyn, NY (2012). Her work has also been featured in group exhibitions at Turn Gallery, New York, NY (2022); The Brand Library, Glendale, CA (2022); LADIES’ ROOM, Los Angeles, CA (2022, 2021, 2020); CCA Oakland Campus, Oakland, CA (2019), Cuevas Tillard Projects, New York, NY (2016); Orgy Park, Brooklyn, NY (2015); Edward Thorp Gallery, New York, NY (2015); and Loyal Gallery, Stockholm, Sweden (2015).
She was awarded a New York Foundation for the Arts Painting Fellow in 2015, and her work has been mentioned in periodicals such as LA Downtown News, Modern Painters, Time Out New York, ArtCritical.com, The New York Observer, The Huffington Post, The New Yorker, artslant.com, Random House, The New York Sun, LA Weekly, and New American Paintings.
Miniature Garden began as an experiment in 2008 by artist Denise Schatz. With an original focus on collaboration, the project has expanded to include individual artist publications. The name was inspired by an image found in a book about houseplants from the 1970’s: A grid of instructional photographs shows a pair of hands—the hands selecting a container, gathering soil, handling tools, placing the plants into dirt and carefully watering them. Being small and independently contained, the miniature garden is similar to a book where ideas can grow.
