Maddy Inez: Venus Freak

Maddy Inez cares for those plants that are unloved, labeled weeds, wildflowers without beauty but imbued with regenerative properties – medicine for us all. She studies botanical illustrations of sunflowers, dandelion, stinging nettle, penny cress, clover, and mustard, not Narcissus, their eternal labor and gifts are neither beauty nor vanity. These plants retain knowledge outside of time, remembering how to remove toxins and heal the soil.

Inez’s responsibility is to both to express the essential beauty and poetry of this matter as dimensional embodiments of relationships of care, and to tend to the physical realities of this symbiosis. As art and gardening are foundational knowledges taught to her by her mother and grandmother, this generational wisdom is a metaphor for the captive maternal care these plants and the soil provide. “Soil is the womb and deathbed of all life on our planet,” she writes in her description of Venus Freak, her solo exhibition that is an ode to these phenomena that overcome colonization and extraction to ensure the health of everything.

Standing sculptures and wall hangings in Venus Freak immerse the viewer in the cyclic nature of beingness. Antecedents provide the building blocks of what follows, passing on memories of life and death, the language of renewal. We experience these phases as weighty yet intangible structure and Inez’s minimalist approach in the space provides a similar alchemic ethereality – the whole exceeding the sum of the parts. Amplifying the stories of the misused and forgotten is inherently political, and Inez fortifies her duty to this work with the poetry of Audre Lorde, Harryette Mullen, bell hooks and other world building women whose languages shape and hold space for our survival.