NEW YORK, NY.- There wasn’t much free ground on which to stand in Brandon Ndife’s Brooklyn studio. Nearly every inch of the space had been swallowed up by a wild profusion of sculptures, which rose from the floor like a dense, unruly forest. The artworks heaved with his facsimiles of botanical life — tree trunks, branches, wheat, vines and vegetables. Twisting and torquing, this biotic matter appeared to be devouring the very things that it had emerged from: quotidian household objects and furniture.
It was a bewildering fusion of the domestic interior and the natural exterior, one that pierces with the chill of the uncanny. In this bewitched ecology, kitchen tiles wretch up tree branches and raffia (“Backsplash”), while winding tree trunks choke cabinets (“Untitled”). Elsewhere, grass sprouts from a table rimmed with gold (“Golden Buffet”).
What created this world? Do the sculptures describe the remnants of a long-abandoned property? The aftermath of an apocalyptic event? The vengeful rebellion of plants against humankind and our cavalier treatment of the earth? However you choose to interpret them, the artworks bear the residue of a struggle, a reordering of things.
“I imagine that they’re coming from these far-fetched, very ethereal places,” Ndife said. “The work is both recognizable and disturbing.” Despite the foreboding tone that shadows his work, the artist is an inviting speaker, with a cadence that balances conviction and warm enthusiasm.
Peering into the dark, strange world evoked in Ndife’s artworks, the optic nerve begins to squirm. The sculptures are unsettling, and Ndife, 33, also wants viewers to interrogate why they find them unsettling, to reckon seriously with our tendency to fear that which we cannot control.
Ndife, who was born in Hammond, Indiana, to parents who are from Nigeria and Barbados, sees much of his work as redressing colonial projects that brutally conquered the natural world. His art reminds its viewers that nature — even in the face of civilization — has an ultimately ungovernable power.
The plants that overtake quaint domestic objects are a metaphor for the insurgent dreams of the dispossessed. “They’re interchangeable to me, the native and the natural,” Ndife said. “There’s a mutiny that can happen in the work. I describe the sculptures as struggling to be, struggling to take hold in their environment. And I think that’s our story as Black people.”
An uneasiness now hovers in the air at Greene Naftali in Chelsea, where Ndife’s first solo exhibition at the gallery, “Clearance,” is on view. The focus of the show is 14 new sculptures, but it also includes six delicate pastel drawings of furniture.
Ndife has been showing steadily since his inclusion in the 2021 New Museum Triennial, which was followed by an installation of his mysterious furnishings under a maple tree at Storm King Art Center in 2022, a reflection on the inequity of shade in urban settings, where trees are few.
Two solo exhibitions, at Bureau gallery in New York and Matthew Brown in Los Angeles, followed, along with recent acquisitions by the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Baltimore Museum of Art. Next month, he will show a commission at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut.
“Brandon is speaking in these beautiful and mournful ways about destruction, evolution and climate,” said Nora Lawrence, who curated Ndife’s exhibition “Shade Tree” at Storm King. “His work is not easy. It’s difficult, it takes time, it’s compelling. He’s addressing things in a language that he has invented and continues to build on.”
Sculptor Simone Leigh, who has recently commissioned a piece from Ndife, senses that his work will have staying power. “It’s a shockingly mature body of work for a younger artist,” Leigh said. “I also think there’s a lot of beauty in his work. It’s impressive, and I’m looking forward to him being part of the discourse going forward.”
The story behind Ndife’s assemblages begins in 2012, when Hurricane Sandy made landfall in New York City and left the streets filled with people’s displaced belongings, including furniture. That year, Ndife was a senior studying painting at Cooper Union. The storm and the infrastructure failures that followed heralded, for him, a paradigm shift. The dystopian sight of domestic interiors spilling out onto urban sidewalks upended the way he looked at his environment and the materials in it.
Ndife left school with a heightened sensitivity to the climate crisis, a new sense of the range of the materials at his disposal and a desire to pursue sculpture. A few years later, he enrolled in the MFA program at Bard College, where the Hudson Valley and its bountiful foliage added to his interest in trees and their aesthetics.
In “Clearance,” the sculptures are installed on gray platforms evoking sidewalks, an homage to the post-Sandy chaos and to the sight of unwanted household objects commingling with the busy street life. When he started making sculptures, Ndife would collect these items and use them in his assemblages.
He eventually began craving the delight of making things on his own. “I felt naked because I didn’t really have an association with the thing,” he said. “It was almost like being a spy inhabiting other people’s space.”
These anxieties led him to casting, the basis of recent projects including “Clearance.” While these cast works give the appearance of being cobbled together from discarded objects, they are made through a process much more elaborate than is immediately apparent. Ndife creates molds out of real-world materials — branches, say, or fruit — which he buys or salvages, and then casts them with foam and resin. Using his background in painting, he colors his cast surfaces; some look so real that you can almost smell the scent of oak and moss.
The wooden furniture at the foundation of the works is re-created from photographs that Ndife takes of furniture left on the city streets and from memories of his childhood home in Columbus, Ohio, where he grew up after his family left Indiana.
His parents weren’t precious about their home décor, he said, buying much of it from large stores like Ashley. That may have helped inform Ndife’s approach to his work. “I’m interested in the generic,” he said, almost defiantly. “It wasn’t like we had special heirlooms inlaid with anything expensive. That just wasn’t our story.”
Ndife saw an artistic opportunity in these plain objects. By incorporating the nondescript design scheme he grew up around, his sculptures nod to the general taste of consumer culture, and then haunt it. The immediately familiar is radically defamiliarized.
Yet the kind of sinister, otherworldly beauty that distinguishes Ndife’s sculptures is anything but generic. In recent years, his work has grown more haunting, suggesting the melancholy of deterioration and decay. While Ndife’s older work teems with verdant greens and blushing red fruit, the works in “Clearance” seem to be rotting and decomposing, tending toward the grotesquerie of death. “Rugburn” features plastic faux grass that looks dried up or even singed “Extra #11 (Onion)” has castings of branches that appear blackened by a wildfire.
Still, the sculptures seem insistently alive, convulsing on the verge of growth despite their artificiality. Ndife said they remind him of the sprawl of his own being. “I take up the wild expanse,” he said, “and I’m just myself.”
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‘Clearance’
Through Oct. 26, Greene Naftali, 508 West 26th St., Manhattan; greenenaftaligallery.com, 212-463-7770.
‘A Garden of Promise and Dissent’
Oct. 28-March 2025, the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, 258 Main St., Ridgefield, Conn.; thealdrich.org, 203-438-4519.
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
