Natasha Bowdoin: The Daisy Argument
Natasha Bowdoin, The Daisy Argument (detail), 2011. Cut paper, acrylic paint, gouache, and pencil. Dimensions variable.
Aren’t you sometimes frightened at being planted out here, with nobody to take care of you?’” asked Alice.
“There’s the tree in the middle,” said the Rose. “What else is it good for?”
“But what could it do, if any danger came?” Alice asked.
“It could bark,” said the Rose.
“It says ‘Boughwough!’” cried the Daisy. “That’s why its branches are called boughs!”
— Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
The Daisy Argument is the third incarnation of a project by Houston-based artist Natasha Bowdoin that documents her transcription of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. Over the past few years, Bowdoin has used language as an organic material to explore the unpredictable presence of words. Her site-specific installations are composed of an ever-changing number of components, including drawings of phrases carefully cut from paper that are re-appropriated with each new exhibition. Her literary translation is a visual process that seeks to make a piece of art that is physically and conceptually permeable, liberated from language’s structural expectations. Rather than functioning as a visualization of the content or the meaning of the author’s text, her works become pictures of words, a visual manifestation of verse. Bowdoin will transform the interior space of The Arcade to create an environment made of layered and interwoven texts that will generate a new setting for prose and the viewer to converge.
Bio
Natasha Bowdoin received her B.A. from Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts in 2003 and her M.F.A. in Painting from Tyler School of Art, Rome, Italy in 2007. She received a Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Grant in 2007 and recently completed the two-year Core Program Residency at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston in 2010. Bowdoin currently lives and works in Houston, and is represented by CTRL Gallery, Houston.