Pinned four high and twelve across a wall, Tara Geer’s 14x11 monoprint drawings at Planthouse Gallery are a hallucinogenic periodic table. Botanical illustrations from a monochromatic world. Renderings of Guillermo del Torro’s fever dreams, “intentionally ambiguous, trustworthy and traitorous, enticingly worrisome and enchanting...”
Geer tells me they’re the substance she imagines living under the city’s pavement. “How do things grow here?” she asks. “How do they have the strength to break through the pavement and live?”
I think they feed off the gum on the soles of our shoes. Siphon the nutrients from the slow decay of a once rotund rat, now melted into the sidewalk, its spine marked if you dare to crouch low. You can see her blooms strain after the rush of a skateboard, ca-chunk, ca-chunk, ca-chunks leaving behind chips of polyurethane to mix and mingle and become part of their mycorrhizal world.