ST. LOUIS.- The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis presents Janaina Tschäpe: Melantropics in its 2006-07 exhibition season. German and Brazilian artist Janaina Tschäpe’s work explores the amalgamation of the female body and landscape through the use of photography, video, and drawings resulting in a curious botanical milieu embodied with notions of sexuality, solitude, and references to mythology and folklore.

The Contemporary invited Janaina Tschäpe to create a new series of photographs and a video during a week-long residency at the Missouri Botanical Garden located in St. Louis, during the spring of 2006. Her photographs and films are created amongst lush botanical settings and quiescent female figures contained within Tschäpe’s directed performance-oriented photographs and videos, wear colorful biomorphic costumes with appendages of latex, fabrics, and inflatables; suggesting illusory and fantastical creatures. In other photographs, Tschäpe populates the surroundings with handmade fabric and plasticine forms that reference imaginary vegetation, thus creating a tension between nature and artifice. The titles of these works, such as Floribunda Noturna, are derived from the artist’s own fictitious botanical nomenclature.

As the location for her artist residency, the Missouri Botanical Garden, founded by Henry Shaw in 1859, is one of the oldest botanical institutions in the country and a National Historic Landmark. The Garden serves as an oasis in the city of St. Louis—79 acres of beautiful horticultural display, including a 14-acre Japanese strolling garden and the Climatron conservatory simulating a tropical lowland forest. Janaina Tschäpe worked with six young women models that wore new artist-made amorphous costumes. The adorned models interacted with a variety of props, such as helium filled balloons, and the natural surroundings of the Garden. Photographed and filmed during the spring, Tschäpe’s subjects served as transitory botanical blooms and foliage that functioned as surrogates for those that withered during the winter season and those yet to blossom.

Accompanying the work made in St. Louis will be new photographs and a video Janaina Tschäpe has created on-site at Parque Lage, located in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Designed in the late 1840s by the English landscape gardener John Tyndale, Parque Lage is comprised of gardens, dense forests, and small grottos. Tschäpe will incorporate similar costumes and props in both bodies of work resulting in a unique juxtaposition between the selected Brazilian and American gardens; leaving one to ponder the photographs and videos as they decipher their locale. The installation will become an abstract representation of both the Missouri Botanical Garden and Parque Lage.

Janaina Tschäpe: Melantropics is organized by the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis and curated by Andrea Green, Curatorial Assistant.