Garden in Bardo was an installation located at Highwire Gallery as part of my solo show in 2008. I was expanding my vegetable garden that year and so trying to cohabit with deer and groundhogs, attempting to configure that limited space within the strictures of light and shadow, hunger and fencing. I was also reading The Rainbow Bridge by Raymond L. Lee Jr. and Alistair B. Fraser, which details the history and working of rainbows and diffracted light. So, squash green and pepper red, and light carrying color in and out of darkness. For the installation I turned the rear room of the gallery into a black box through the liberal application of tarpaper to all surfaces. Once the room was blacked out, white panels went up flat against the ceiling and below a garden of broken glass took shape, all different colors both arranged on the top of mulch-filled buckets and held suspended in wire armatures. Spotlights were improvised from cheap incandescent scoop lights; these were used to bounce light of and through the broken colored glass so that it rose through the close, dusty, tar-smelling air to the panels on the ceiling. The most fun I had while putting this together was gathering colored glass bottles and then breaking them – they come in more shades (and more shades come in them) than you might imagine.
