Bent Grass
Screenprint on tissue paper with foraged grass
September through November 2024
Cube Space Gallery, City of Berkeley Civic Arts
Over 200 individually pulled, four-process-color screenprints depicting a nearby lawn atop a mound of foraged grass from the nearby hills.
In Bent Grass, artist Emily Gui presents an installation of foraged dried grasses, over which a roll of gridded prints is suspended, evoking the nearby Berkeley Hills. Inspired by the seasonal changes in the Bay Area, with its cycles of verdant green and decaying brown, Gui reflects on how our perceptions of something as seemingly innocuous as grass can shape our relationship to the local landscape. If we look closer—at manicured lawns, livestock pasture, and native grassland, we can recognize that the golden hills are often a mixture of species endemic or introduced to our area. Whether it’s the seasonal wildfires that plague California or the class and cultural significance of a pristine, green lawn, Gui invites us to slow down and consider the materials we take for granted.
As a printmaker, Gui often works with duplication and artifice. The printing process copies a single image and replicates it as many times as one might wish. When considering the way in which lawns interact with grasses, Gui saw a similar kind of action, where patches of pre-grown material are purchased on demand and pressed into the ground, resulting in a social image of the perfect lawn for the all-American home. But as American as a lawn might seem now, the initial concept was brought to this country during colonization and the species pictured were imported, mostly from Europe. In California, this artifice is not only "unnatural" but can be actively harmful. Contradictions are at the heart of understanding this complexity—a given patch of green grass can symbolize both reckless over-watering or respite from drought when rains return. And while fire can be destructive, cultural burns, a practice utilized by the Ohlone people in this area for thousands of years, help to mitigate wildfire, restore land and promote growth. Like the roll of printed grass, this thin veneer of lawn work rests atop the realities that many of us have decided are not worthy of equal consideration. Bent Grass reminds us to look under the artifice and reflect on the landscape that is fabricated, wild or somewhere in-between.
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Emily Gui (b. 1990, pronounced "Guy") is an interdisciplinary artist and educator originally from the East Coast. Moving between printmaking, sculpture, photography and installation, her work pushes the boundaries of process and technique through layering and material experimentation. Her research focuses broadly on consumerism and the hazy space where collective and individual responsibilities clash in the face of climate change. Gui's current projects re-materialize the inconspicuous to examine nuances of human relationships with materials by making unseen things felt. On the verge of familiar, her projects invite the viewer to scrutinize the systems that have built our modern world. Lingering in complexity and anxiety, Gui's work unearths questions about our habits and assumptions with levity but without offering a comforting solution.
Documentation of screen print on tissue paper
