In a gray Memphis winter, Justin Bowles’ vibrant garden blooms in Tops’ window gallery at Madison Avenue Park. The garden, populated with hot pink plastic yard flamingos and bouquets of artificial dollar-store flowers and springing forth with small blue toy horses, is Bowles’ latest public art installation, this one being titled “Green Fountain.” Its purpose, the artist says, is to bring joy.
In curating her exhibit, Bowles created three paper collages: Baby Chi, My Backyard, and Wolf Garden. Baby Chi, in particular, is a depiction of her chihuahua she had for many years, a “representation of unconditional love,” she says, but in general these three collages represent her “love of nature, of gardening, of animals. … To me, those are universal things that anyone can access and anyone can experience joy from.”
The collages bring forth a world of whimsy, a secret garden for the viewer to step into, with its simple drawings and childlike aesthetic. “I don’t ever put people in my artwork because I want the viewer to be experiencing, instead of the viewer looking at another person in the artwork,” Bowles says.
With that in mind, Bowles’ environment is full of sculptural elements saturated in nostalgia. For instance, those tiny blue horses are toy horses she played with as a child. “I was so excited to find them at my mom’s house,” she says. “I was like, ‘If I paint these and put them in my installation, then I’m still enjoying them and they’re still having a life in this environment.’”
In another bid for nostalgia, Bowles also made large fabric strawberries that sit on the floor. “I was inspired by my grandmother and her sister who got in this crafty phrase, I think, in the ’80s, where they were making all these little fabric fruits,” she says. “So it’s like a part of my grandmother is there, too.”
But Bowles doesn’t expect the average viewer to know these small details of her life. After all, that’s the nature of public art, where more often than not, a viewer who encounters the exhibit is not seeking it out but might have just happened upon it. “Anyone can see [this space] 24/7,” Bowles says. “It’s really living a life of its own without me.”
Even so, that sense of nostalgia carries on, without biographical information, as each piece in the curated garden means something to the artist or to someone, known or unknown. Those dollar-store flowers, Bowles says, remind her of “the things people have in their homes to make it beautiful, like a form of self-expression.” A green beaded basket also sits in the garden, something she thrifted. “Somebody made this by hand, who knows how long it took them to make that,” she says. “I had to buy it. It’s a beautiful piece of art. It’s just a never-ending fascination for me as far as all the things that we collect and treasure.”
Her hope, ultimately, is that at least one of these recognizable elements, if not all, captures a glimpse of nostalgia or joy. Having created murals throughout the city and recently having sculpted a piece for the University of Memphis as a New Public Artist Fellow for the UrbanArt Commission, Bowles sees public art as a unique opportunity to do so. “You do get to interact with people that you wouldn’t normally if you have a gallery or museum show,” she says.
At this, she recalls serving Thanksgiving dinner at a shelter this year when a friend told one of the guests about her installation which had opened a few weeks prior. “She showed him a picture of it,” Bowles says. “And he said, ‘I’ve spent the night right in front of that glass.’ And he proceeded to tell me how inspiring and encouraging it was to him and all the things that he thought about while sleeping there. That was just such a blessing to me to know that somebody who I don’t know, who maybe I never would have met, and didn’t know who I was, had a positive, uplifting experience with the art that had nothing to do with me.”
Bowles goes on to say: “It was a lot of hard work making this. If I’m going to put this much hard work into it, I really want the viewer to have that experience.”
“Green Fountain” is on view through February 16th at Tops at Madison Avenue Park.
