Time to plant tears, says the almanac.
The grandmother sings to the marvelous stove
and the child draws another inscrutable house.
—Elizabeth Bishop, Sestina
The life wheel turns and mountains wake to spring. A bed of earth where hearts are buried. In the house of love and plenty, Este Lewis is our gardener. She plants bleeding hearts, little lantern teardrops, chandeliers of time-shed feeling. Before our eyes, some roots bloom al-ready, in a blanket of soft tissue, a cascade of the heart’s secret stream.
In residence at Triangolo, Cremona, Laurel Gitlen is delighted to present Time to plant hearts, the gallery’s inaugural solo exhibition with life artist Este Lewis. For fifteen years, Lewis has pressed open her heart’s gleanings in Buy-Write, an expansive diary-receipt project documenting and activating the artist’s online purchases. The triad work on view in Cremona showcases Buy-Write within Lewis’ romantic garden of sensibility, alongside Floral Toilet Paper Garden, where intricately patterned toilet paper is recast as wallpaper, and Time to plant hearts, sounding the call of an international movement to plant heart gardens.
Such artworks trace the arc of Lewis’ life, and our own cultural milieu. The online shopping era began in the 1990s and has since taken over our existence, from ordering home staples and giving into closet splurges to the world witnessing the Amazon nuptials in Venice, a flagrant display of consumerist ostentation. The buying culture that made it possible, and to which we are all tethered, becomes a launchpad and canvas for conscious change in Lewis’ work. While most are too anaesthetized by easy shopping to function as more than cogs in the wheel after a deal, Lewis reinstates an arena of priva-te communion and interpersonal connection within our buying frenzy by using the gift-note field of her transactions as a redemptive artistic space for poetic messaging to self (and strangers) and a framework for art (oftentimes, hand-drawn hearts).
Lewis’ artful receipt archive comprises Buy-Write, a long-term library housed in binders and exhibited here in abridged form. This includes a catalogue of recent acquisitions: a Joyce Mansour collection; Anne Carson’s Nox; a gardening hand tool; and bleeding hearts from a nursery in Brescia, for which Lewis’ spirited gift-note reads, Tempo di piantare cuori, time to plant hearts. Lewis binds word—her words, your words—to the wings of purchase, at a cross-section of competing economies: farmers, publishers, “big box” companies. She likens her buying hi-story to an experimental diary, an activation of our right to amend our consumerist habits and reorient ourselves creatively, in pursuit of a kinder, gentler, more tender, thoughtful world.
Lewis’ gift-notes skirt the ethers of creation. Everyone’s creation. Everyone wrapped inside creation: seller, buyer, coveted thing.
Both artwork and instruction, Buy-Write initiates us into a natural “rite,” a genre of spiritual rectification, of alchemizing that which is systemically inhuman, compulsively unbearable. She imperceptibly urges us to Buy-Write, to buy in the right way, as deftly as she quotes Elizabeth Bi-shop’s Sestina to compose a gift-note or writes while ordering underwear: I finally told my therapist that I am attracted to him and Googled him befiore our first session 28 weeks ago and discovered that he was a male model and fiound an article about him in Rolling Stone magazine firom 2000. Lewis invites her audience to wield authorial agency at a vulnerable choice-point; in the moment of clicking buy, to sign each whim By me, to remember our why’s, our we’s.
Hailing from a family of artists, including her late brother, Hesh Halper, well-known for chalking thousands of hearts on the streets of New York City, Lewis often asks vendors to draw hearts: to garland their packages with a semiotics of empathy. As the hand of production warms, wishes wayshow a new consciousness amidst universal bounty, a surplus of too much everything. Memory and desire stir and wasted time is unspent, through a living book that exceeds cardboard casings, as Lewis threads a world-long lattice of text, want and seed.
On the occasion of this exhibition, Lewis extends Buy-Wri-te’s lattice to the flower field, anchoring her heart plants in Italy’s rich soil. In preparing for the show, she be-gan a series of ongoing plantings at sites closer to home; availing domestically sourced buds that survived a severe hailstorm to tough it out in urban settings and to honor her brother’s grave. These heart plantings are installatively linked to a wallpaper “orchard” that offers viewers glimpses of the artist’s attention to detail, seen in rib-bon-like panels of embossed rosettes interposed with fairy banners of lavender and lemon yellow, capturing the ephemeral nature of the tissue medium while evoking an imaginal scape beyond ordinary functionality.
Lewis earns the title of lifie artist because she is always creating art out of her life. Her shopping trail is akin to a confession: Freud’s couch and place of prayer. Her oeuvre is a garden of self in a world gone mad. In the lineage of artists such as Linda Mary Montano and Hanne Darboven, Lewis plods towards faith and the teachings of expe-rience. All this becomes a portal, the heart-bled whisper. It is up to you to dig your hands into the dirt, to weed out materialist mundanities, to seek, and dwell in, our truest ecstasies. Eschatological compressions fall away in divine reset, in the flow of Mother Nature, a call for planting as rite of passage, for the heartfelt, transcendental exchange that may set our visions free.
– Lily Koppel and Moselle Kleiner
