Martha Glowacki’s Natural History, Observations and Reflections Martha Glowacki’s Natural History | Page 9

The Resistance to Reification:
Martha Glowacki’s Casts
caliper and a pair of scissors are turned toward
one another on a table. Though they belong to
the same category, “instrument,” and appear
here similarly rusted yet still sharp, these utensils are
placed as if in a dialogue about their different purpos-
es: one promises to gauge growth; the other to sever
it. Next to the tools a tray supports a metal-sheened
mound of rocky soil, from which sprouts a sapling
(Figure 1). Its most bountiful branch, composed of
leaves and shoots cast in bronze, is enclosed in an oblong
cage. (The longest stalk pokes just beyond the opening
at the top of the netlike apparatus, as if to suggest that
the plant is outgrowing its enclosure.) On the shiny,
gilded mound that grounds the tree, a fissure spreads in
a horizontal line. This quiet disturbance to the surface,
perhaps suggestive of a resistance to reification, sets the
tone of Martha Glowacki’s exhibition as a whole. Here,
both the impulse to examine or imagine the develop-
ment of curious specimens and the subtle dangers of
controlling wildness are placed on display.

In the history of art’s role in the representation of flora
and fauna, the perils of fixity have long been known.
Pliny, describing in his Natural History the first Greeks
to annotate their paintings of plants with descriptions,
remarked that representations fail to disclose how plants
“change their appearance according to the fourfold
changes of the year.” 1 Where the phases of ontogeny
were spelled out in visual depictions, pictures condensed
different stages into a single image that operated dia-
chronically, as in sixteenth-century illustrations of the
Left: Lacuna (detail), 2016. Photo Mike Rebholz.
Figure 1. Martha Glowacki (American, b. 1950), Growing Towards
the Light (detail), 2015–2016, steel, bronze, cast iron, wood,
pigments, inkjet prints, size varies. Photo Mike Rebholz.
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