Hermes in the Greenhouse

After an oil Mordor detour, Steve Kado meets artist-orchidist Jason Gomez and the plant perverts at CSU Bakersfield’s gallery.

By Steve KadoDecember 10, 2024

JASON GOMEZ: NOVELTY BREEDING, Todd Madigan Gallery, Bakersfield, November 14, 2024–January 25, 2025.

When the Getty announced that the new iteration of its Pacific Standard Time initiative was to focus on the meeting of art and science, I was cautiously optimistic. Southern California’s art world does live in a weird balance with aerospace, oil (geology), and big agriculture interests (hydrology/biology). Both the Hammer Museum and the Getty exist thanks to oil wealth, and some of our notable historic art movements (for example Light and Space, with its reliance on aerospace materials and engineering techniques) have thrived in this strange soil. My hopes were dashed when I saw the tagline: “Science says you need more art.” A horrible, patronizing slogan. It is science that determines when you’ve had enough art; you can’t be trusted to set your own dose. Beaten down after years of hearing incoming university presidents muse about eliminating the school library to make way for 3D printers, I felt my soul leave my body. As I began making a (not exhaustive) survey of the shows, it became clear that the organizers of PST hadn’t asked for much more than 3D printing: simply having a computer somehow involved in the art-making process was sufficient to qualify as an engagement with “science.” It seemed like the discussion at the corner of Art Avenue and Science Street had reached a terminal point of mutual incomprehension.

I had reason to hope that Jason Gomez’s current exhibition at California State University, Bakersfield would be a model of what a more sincere interaction at the boundary of art and science might look like. Over the last 10 years, Gomez has cultivated and collected rare orchids at his greenhouse/studio in Oxnard while simultaneously pursuing an art practice. He refuses to draw a hard line between the two. Conversations about sculpture shift seamlessly into hypertechnical discussions of orchid biology, thoughts about the byzantine economic workings of the plant-fancier community bleed into art-world gossip. He told me that curator Jedediah Caesar had connected him to figures in the CSUB biology department, who had taken him farther into plants than ever before.

Arriving in Bakersfield for the opening festivities, I indulged myself with a bike ride to shake off the cobwebs of the drive over the Grapevine. The bike routes I chose wound along the Kern River and up into the hills on the east side of town, toward an area on the map labeled Oil City. While the Kern River itself is quite beautiful, lazily meandering out of the hills, my expectations for Oil City, a petrochemical Mordor, were entirely satisfied—the air scorched my throat with powerful ammonia-scented fumes. No matter where I went in this interzone between residential and industrial land, there was no escaping the sickening pong. The only other person I saw during the whole ride was in the middle of starting a garbage fire.

I cut my losses, packed up my bike and headed for CSUB. It’s a campus of low, surprisingly charming brutalist and off-brutalist buildings featuring some of the largest and clearest signage I’ve ever encountered. The exhibition occupied both the university’s Todd Madigan Gallery and an on-campus greenhouse. On entering the gallery, I found the floor occupied by various arrangements of flowerpots. Some of the pot sculptures were in standard terra-cotta colors, others in white porcelain, and some enclosed in Lucite towers. In previous exhibitions, Gomez has deployed the flowerpots stacked top to bottom to top as a pun on the work of Constantin Brâncuși, bringing the everyday reality of working and living with plants into contact with ur-modernist sculpture. Here, the arrangement looked like someone had just burgled a nursery searching for a rare specimen in the collection of a rival. Circling the gallery were prints of non-photographic scanning electron microscope (SEM) images of orchids framed with technical identifiers, scale markings, and other inscrutable information. Nestled between the images on the walls were 3D prints showing cross sections and magnifications of orchid body parts, the information for these gathered through CT scans. Gomez told me that his ultimate goal was to make a model of an orchid so large that a human can get inside to experience the internal structures that have evolved to entice pollinators. The 3D models then are a kind of trace of the artist’s own desire to know orchids as a bee does.

At their core, both art history and science are processes for producing knowledge—whether about the internal structures in the pistils and stamen of specific strains of pistachios or the differences between Peter Kubelka flicker films and Tony Conrad flicker films. The goal is to determine what is the thing you’re looking at and why it couldn’t be anything else. What’s left out of this conversation is often the reason why someone cares to investigate these distinctions, what motivates the true freak to delve into these microcosms, why is this the specific hair you’d like to devote your life to splitting? It is in this zone of intense, perverse differentiation that Gomez and his scientist collaborators (R. Brandon Pratt and Anna Jacobsen of CSUB’s Department of Biology) joined forces. Gomez brought the orchids from his Oxnard greenhouse to one on campus, both to make them available for study by horticulturalists, biologists, and other plant perverts and to ground his representations in “the real.” I’m told that the scientists that worked with him saw Gomez as a fellow traveler, someone seeking to know plants in a deeper, perhaps even nonhuman way—like an insect, an electron, a wave, or a pulse.

On the threshold of the gallery, Gomez placed a painting of Hermes—patron deity of commerce and eloquence, messenger between human and supernatural realms, and luxury brand namesake—to help mediate between the two spaces of the exhibition but also between other, stranger areas. That the exhibition takes place in Bakersfield also serves to amplify the sense of in-betweenness: it’s the first big city north of the Grapevine, gateway to the Central Valley, where big agriculture and oil take over from Hollywood and aerospace. While in Los Angeles we know the Resnicks as patrons of the arts, in Kern County they maintain an entire company town to service their mega-sized almond and pistachio orchards. Until diverting their attention to orchids, the scientists involved in Gomez’s exhibition were working on trees, specifically almonds and pistachios: research happens when there’s someone who can afford to pick up the tab for it. If anything determines when you’ve had enough science or art, it’s capitalism.

However, Hermes facilitates another kind of meeting between art and science, the meeting of enthusiasts, cultists, and perverts brought together by their extremely specific curiosity to celebrate plants under the long shadow of the market’s all-too-visible hand. Standing outside the gallery, I watched the sun set behind a geodesic dome while another carload of celebrants piled into the space. The optimism of R. Buckminster Fuller’s domes—that technology united with art in architecture could lead us to a new, more positive way of living—seems corny now. Washed in colors only petrochemical pollution can make, outside of an exhibition founded on the solidarity between scientists and artists, the dome darkened. Our betters (if their AI-generated images are to be believed) will soon be inhabiting Fulleresque domes in their new Martian colonies. While they look down on us from the heavens, we’ll have to rely on friendships, the association of like-minded weirdos, and other uncapitalizable relationships here on the only known planet capable of sustaining animal-plant collaboration.

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Photo by Cameron Crone.

LARB Short Takes live event reviews are published in partnership with the nonprofit Online Journalism Project and the Independent Review Crew.