On Zina Swanson

Or so it does in Zina Swanson’s intentionally indeterminate conceptual and aesthetic plant-human worlds. Meaning quivers between viewer and work, plant and human, and between each decomposing twig and the vibratory aura the artist depicts. Yet the language attending these exchanges often inadvertently reifies twoness rather than quivering. Even the conjunction “and” seems to sediment the separation of plant and human, a hyphen (plant-human) fares little better, while the stitching together of individual words, such as the compressed compound “natureculture,” (2) fails to fully unsettle the binary of nature (over there) and culture (here). These examples of linear syntax’s inability to disrupt binaries serve to heighten the indeterminacy so clearly at play in Swanson’s work....