“If you look at the way a leaf grows, you can see the math in it.” 
– Kendall Buster

The growth of a seed suggests a benign intervention, a germination in which it blossoms from its origin and into a seedling – the beginning of what can be imagined. Trained as a microbiologist, Buster’s work suggests ideas of budding, merging, and hybridization, using abstract forms and high-tech materials to create objects that expand what we know of natural and made environments. Her practice examines the microscopic and the monumental, from works that allude to intimate, botanical illustrations to architectural drawings to life-size biomorphic vessels. With the gallery assuming the role of a laboratory, Buster’s work interrogates the edges of free expression and posits new ways of thinking about what can and cannot be expressed.

Constructed with accessible interior spaces, Kendall Buster’s Radial Spin resides in a place between plant, organism, object, and architecture. With its first iteration last exhibited in 1997 in Berlin, this site-specific object dwarfs and envelopes the viewer, challenging their sense of perception while providing an embrace and shelter for the individuals who inhabit them. It has an imaginary point from which the form has been spun, marking both the center where the body stands and the oculus where the eye peers within. In conversation with the biomorphic radial vessel, are digital prints made from graphite on mylar drawings, which are part of the ongoing series New Growth: Biological Models for a New Architecture. These works serve as an inventory of imagined object-spaces that provide a sense of things that may exist elsewhere. 

SEED presents work that moves fluidly between real and imagined, natural and made, and scale and play, thus positioning them as objects that expand perspectives and possibilities.

“Kendall Buster’s Model City (Constraint) emphasizes the wise phrase – ‘Where there is light, there must be shadow, and where there is shadow there must be light." - Jaynelle Hazard, Curator

SOLSTICE, on view at the Kreeger Museum, features the single installation Model City (Constraint) which suggests a sprawling landscape of brute forms, referencing both geometric abstraction and modernist architecture. For Buster, the work demonstrates an exploration into ways in which the monumental can be expressed through the miniature. In the exhibition, sunshine filters into the gallery, defining the works’ whorls and chambers in an unpopulated cityscape that seems filled with talking shadows. Feeling nostalgic while simultaneously futuristic, there is a dialogue with nature and a negotiation of light in the space, providing a sense of strange wonderment.

With the installation being perfectly white and its chalky, gouache matte material, the angled models made with cardboard and paper suggest observation towers, enclosures without exits, windows for hidden eyes, or coliseum-like pits. In alignment with Buster’s practice, there is a push and pull of the interior and exterior, provoking the question of whether the viewer is looking in, looking out, looking up, looking down, or whether they are being looked at.

Exhibition Catalogue

SEED and SOLSTICE are both curated by Jaynelle Hazard, and special programming is presented in partnership with American University, The Kreeger Museum, and Reston Community Center.