The only way to kill it for good is to burn it.įor the installation in ‘Studio Parasite,’ one of artist’s many works centering the vine, Dean designed two seedbeds, into which Kudzu sproutlings were recently transplanted, grown from seeds leading up to the exhibition’s opening.
The wooden planters are encased in plexiglass cubes to prevent spore dispersion into the local ecosystem and positioned under grow lights, most commonly associated with the growth of marijuana. The plant will have a hyperconcentrated period of growth throughout the course of the exhibition timed for the start of spring with continuous access to light, natural through the windows and artificial from the lights.
The plants grow until the final week of the show, and are then burned roots, soil planter and all. The ashes are placed back into the plexiglass cubes turned upright and shipped back to the artist to form a new series of sculptures. The exhibition creates a parasitic system without a host - or if there is a host, it is the white cube. The system that the exhibition starts up models something similar to art, or a studio practice, cycling and recycling ideas and materials - but it models art as a structural parasite, necessarily territorializing everything around it to keep itself alive. Though here, the parasite is, again, physically without a host. On the other hand, Dean’s interest in Kudzu lies in its potential parallels to blackness, a return to her past inquiries around the ontology of blackness as a sort of viral force, a system of meaning capable of reproducing itself and its own meaning structures without any ontological core. The Kudzu thing started as yet another joke in a way - or no, it was quite serious, when I was trying to write the play for the Hammer and thinking about the South. I was trying very hard to visualize an abandoned plantation and remembered my grandmother -Īctually no, I went to give a talk in Atlanta in August 2019, and I hadn’t been there in a number of years. I used to visit my Abuela there every summer with my younger brother. I did my talk and then spent a few nights in Decatur at her house. She drives but really shouldn’t anymore, so I spent much of the time shuttling her around in her little KIA–the bank, the supermarket, visiting my cousin at my Aunt’s house.
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