Queer Gardens: Lost at Home

Frankie Toan: Queer Gardens: Lost at Home

The Storeroom

1700 Vine Street, Denver, Colorado, 80206

September-December 13, 2020

Admission: Free

Review by Mary Grace Bernard

The Storeroom is a relatively new exhibition space located next to Vine Street Pub & Brewery on 17th Street in Denver. Opening less than two years ago, the installation space has already featured almost a dozen shows. For The Storeroom’s most recent exhibit, local artist Frankie Toan has transformed the one-hundred square foot gallery into the artist’s third installment of a series called Queer Gardens.

A view of The Storeroom on 17th Street in Denver with Frankie Toan’s Queer Gardens: Lost at Home installation on display. Image by Mary Grace Bernard.

The title panel of Frankie Toan’s Queer Gardens: Lost at Home installation, 2020, on display at The Storeroom. Image by DARIA.

Based in Denver, Toan (they/them/theirs) is an artist working primarily with craft and DIY materials and techniques. They create large plush sculptures, interactive works, and immersive installations that blur the boundaries between public and private spaces, fantasy and reality, and the body and identity. In Toan’s multiple installations of Queer Gardens, the artist welcomes viewers with colorful, soft, three-dimensional fabric works that seem to ask you to embrace them, as if the sculptures want to provide a brief pillow of comfort and care.

Frankie Toan, Queer Gardens: Lost at Home (flower detail), 2020. Image by Mary Grace Bernard.

As Toan describes in their artist statement, Queer Gardens is a “radical reimagining” of productivity—a concept often corrupted by capitalistic society, which is an economic system that deems unproductive bodies as unworthy, useless, and expendable. [1] Instead, the artist asks audience members to think of productivity in new ways that exclude material means (e.g. money, financial wealth, property, clothes, etc.) but—like the materials Toan uses—include relationships of care and dependency.

Frankie Toan, Trans Magic, Iteration 1, 2016. Image by Wes Magyar.

Care and dependency are two concepts that occur throughout most of Toan’s works. [2] Trans Magic, for example, an evolving project that speaks to the artist’s care for their own body and constant dependency on medicine, features an altar made of syringes, medicine vials, and orange peels that resemble transforming skin (materials rarely seen in Toan’s other bodies of work). While Trans Magic is a more direct vision of care and dependency, Queer Gardens, on the other hand, talks to viewers indirectly. Using their usual craft techniques, the artist constructs a garden as a metaphor for care and dependency: a place where humans might recognize both their dependency on nature, the care they must provide nature, and vice versa. Together, humans and nature make up an ecosystem that constantly relies on the other to survive.

Frankie Toan, Queer Gardens: Lost at Home (detail with two figures holding hands in the background), 2020. Image by Mary Grace Bernard.

Frankie Toan, Queer Gardens: Lost at Home (flamingo detail), 2020. Image by DARIA.

Queer Gardens: Lost at Home, Toan’s installation at The Storeroom, presents a garden living and responding to the COVID-19 pandemic. In the foreground, viewers are greeted with plush flowers that grow wild when moving from right to left. The middle ground showcases fabric renderings of plastic flamingos—a humorous piece of Americana implying the “home garden” setting. A bunny, bat, and opossum also accompany the scene. In the background, two figures hold hands behind two giant bushes. Just as humans have withdrawn from public spaces due to the pandemic, Toan relegates these humans to the background as the natural ecosystem reclaims the garden for itself. [3] Ironically, because of COVID-19, property owners’ yards and gardens have never been so manicured.

Ultimately, Toan’s installation calls on viewers to look critically at the relationships between themselves and others, nature, and the definition of productivity. In particular, the artist asks audience members to think of all relationships (human and non-human) as mutually dependent, mutually caregiving, and without boundaries. Just as the pandemic has reminded us of our vulnerability, the garden reminds us of our intricate connection to the natural world.

Mary Grace (MG) Bernard is a (dis)abled emerging artist, independent curator, and art writer living and working in New Orleans and Denver. She lives with cystic fibrosis, a chronic illness that informs her daily art and writing practices. She combines art theory and art practice in an effort to break down binaries and the relationships between the public and private spheres of experience. MG is the Founder & Director of Femme Salée, an innovative online art journal and zine dedicated to the voices working within exceptional art communities.

[1] Frankie Toan, “Artist Statement,” Queer Gardens: Lost at Home.

[2] Artist Park McArthur defines care as “a spectrum of dependency and labor different than childcare, different than elder care, and different than the heteropatriarchal configurations of an unwaged laborer reproducing a wage laborer for tomorrow’s workday.” In other words, care is about the labor of individuals caring for others regardless of their ability to be “functioning members of capitalistic society.” Park McArthur, “Sort of Like a Hug: Notes on Collectivity, Conviviality, and Care,” The Happy Hypocrite 7 (2014), 51. Dependency is about humans being dependent on continuous care from the self and from others whether they recognize it or not.

[3] Frankie Toan, “Artist Statement,” Queer Gardens: Lost at Home.