In American Lawn, Alex Callender imagines the ubiquitous familiarity of lawn grass as a conflicted terrain that holds ongoing questions of public and private space, haunted vegetation, and the legacies of colonialism and settler land management in our current era of climate devastation.

Through Callender’s reframing of historical materials in the painted plane, we encounter fragments of flooding lawns that designate the iconic green turf of private property, landscapes of leisure, and idealized pastoral imagery. The monotone palette of industrialized lawn plants like Kentucky Bluegrass are interrupted by both plantation cane grasses (sugar) and wild grasses like Bluestems, Lovegrass, Vetiver… grasses that are self-seeding and drought-resistant, cultivate soil restoration, brace the flow of waters, and offer refuge to pollinators and varied wildlife.

In these scenes of twilight and geographical uncertainty, the landscape and the water’s edge merge closer together to reveal a historical Atlantic space — a place that loops. A site to explore American mythologies about land and conquest, invoking the kinds of manufactured environments that have comfortably maintained and spatially defined structures of racial and ecological supremacy. What plants get caught up in stories of human violence?