Humble houseplant focus of UB Art Galleries exhibition

“Temple of Hortus,” multimedia artist Amanda Besl’s multilayered ode to the humble houseplant, opens on March 27 in the Second Floor Gallery of the UB Art Gallery in the Center of the Arts, North Campus.

An opening reception takes place from 5-8 p.m. March 27 in the gallery. The exhibition runs through May 18.

Humans have created co-dependent relationships with the plants in our care — they rely on us for food and nutrients, and we arrange them to suit our whims. Houseplants give back oxygen and beauty, and we design our built environment to accommodate them. Cyclically, through hybridization, we make them even more reliant on us. The plants we cajole into growth bear the long and continuing legacies of colonialism, extraction and ownership. Who is “allowed” to cultivate and collect? What makes a plant desirable to a person? How is “invasiveness” defined.?

Besl’s paintings, videos and sculptures explore these questions in an immersive installation, creating a hortus — or garden — temple within which to contemplate human intervention and the blurred lines beteen the natural and artificial.

The central piece of the exhibition, a greenhouse flanked by human-sized stamen, suggests the experience of entering a flower’s pistil. Visitors are drawn into this botanical environment like pollinators, enticed by a looping kaleidoscopic video projection. Beyond the temple, crocheted Spanish moss, pink tones reminiscent of a grow light, bell jars, and a series of paintings and sculptures reimagine the cultivation of hybridized plants. “Temple of Hortus” brings together surreal and eco-gothic elements to help us reconsider the plants that we know so well — or think we do.

“What I find so compelling about Amanda’s work is the beauty of her oil paintings and sculptures, coupled with their suggestion of the uncanny,” says UB Art Galleries Curator Anna Wager. “Her painted hoyas, orchids and Venus flytraps are so seductive that you long to have them in your house — which is entirely the point.”

“‘Temple of Hortus,’” Besl explains, “explores comtemporary society’s relationship with the botanical other.

“Plants maintain a kind of immortality that humans can’t replicate. We can’t break off a thumb and plant it to clone ourselves. In nature, plants adapt and evolve to manipulate their surrounding communities. In our homes, we give plants the window, blocking our own access to vitamin D. We annoint them with fertilizers derived from blood and bone, and the most devoted among us construct humid, temperature-controlled temples bathed in electric pink light,” Besl says.

“When isolated from the rest of the plant and drawn in warm tones, the plant forms suggest human anatomy, and the fluorescent pink surrounding them exoticizes the notion of flesh.

“We may forget that these are parts of plants — not parts of us.”

A Buffalo-based painter and experimental filmmaker, Besl has exhibited widely throughout New York State, as well as in Belgium, France, the Netherlands and Russia. She holds an MFA in painting from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, and a BFA from SUNY Oswego.

Her paintings are part of several notable private and public collections, including Buffalo’s Burchfield Penney Art Center; Nichido Contemporary, Tokyo, Japan; the Burger Collection, Hong Kong; and the Tullman Collection, Chicago.

Besl uses natural history as a platform to explore social issues. She was awarded a 2024 New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) grant for “Temple of Hortus.”