Christopher Ulivo, a painter from Ventura, is the Taft Gardens 4-week Rotational Artist in Residence for November. During his residency, Chris is seizing the opportunity to further develop an idea he originally had some years ago – one where he will create a narrative story told from the viewpoint of the the gardens plants.
“Most people (during residencies) do something super positive and beautiful about nature. But what if there’s a little more sinister intent or all the other kinds of fallacies and foibles? We assume it’s great, but they’re fighting with each other too, sending chemicals to ward off animals and get rid of pests and stuff,” he jokes.
Chris, who is known for his surreal and fantasy-infused paintings, is using this residency to do something different from what he typically does at his art studio. He is creating handmade and hand-drawn pages and will handwrite the story on the pages he created. He intends to print and publish a small edition of the book in 2023.
Like his artist-in-residence colleague, Natasha Wheat, Chris was also deeply inspired by the burn piles.
“Seeing that kind of rot and decomposition was moving to me. Part of the narrative is that the plants will be vindictive and fed up … the plants are writing a memoir,” he said, noting that the visit to the burn pile gave him a clearer vision of the direction to take the narrative in. “I think the narrator will be moss. It’s very intelligent and wise; it can’t draw, so it needs someone to be like its press agent. I’m the toady for some super wise old plant.”
Giving flesh to fantasy is what drives his creative process. Chris sees himself as an advocate for the possibility of complex visual narratives in contemporary art.
“Imagination is a really powerful engine, but you have to work on it,” he said. “I’ve spent most of my days working on my imagination – I don’t work from any references ever. It’s really about honing a sense of curiosity and mind. I have an ability to imagine and recollect things, then create things just from my sense of imagination. They’re always wrong, but they’re hopefully consistently sincere.”
Chris received his Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Tyler School of Art, Temple University, and his Master of Fine Arts from Rhode Island School of Design. He has exhibited and organized shows across the United States and Europe including: Half Gallery, Los Angeles; Susan Inglett Gallery, New York; Axel Obiger, Berlin; Museum of Contemporary Art, Santa Barbara; The Felix Art Fair, Los Angeles; The Armory Show, New York; and The Benkai Museum, Athens.
Chris is grateful to have a new space to imagine in and loves that of the residencies he has done, his residency at Taft Gardens is “idiosyncratic.”
“I love botanical gardens because I kind of like that it controls nature in a way. A lot of times, botanical gardens are like a museum – and I appreciate that – and they want to have a catalogue of species. Here, it feels like people are responding to the space,” he said. “They’re really creative about how they use this space. It feels like there’s a lot of intersection of their aesthetics with the landscape.”
Copywriting: DeAnna Carpenter @shewhobuilds
Photos: Marc Alt @marcaltphoto
Graphics: Louise Sandhaus @lulusandhaus