ANNA BETBEZE: ‘Moss Garden’
Kate Werble Gallery
83 Vandam Street
SoHo
New York
Until March 12 2011
Flokati rugs, those fluffy white coverings traditionally handmade in the Pindus Mountains in Europe and prized by contemporary designers, become wild-and-woolly wall reliefs in Anna Betbeze’s first New York solo. Ms. Betbeze dyes, scorches, shreds, shaves and otherwise attacks these shaggy objects until they start to look more like sheep’s carcasses than sheep’s coats. […]
These titles (and the show’s title, “Moss Garden”) refer to Michel Foucault, who lectured that “the garden is a rug onto which the whole world comes to enact its symbolic perfection, and the rug is a sort of garden that can move across space.” Fortunately the artworks don’t take themselves as seriously; they have a wonderfully forlorn, abject quality that inspires more empathy than theory.
Foucault News 