Nate Harrison and Carla Herrera-Prats - Garden Variety

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Garden Variety offers a meditation on the United States' historical relationship with the natural landscape. It weaves together a constellation of concepts: the pursuit of "bounty" both at home and abroad, agricultural engineering, patriotism and community. A narrative text is interwoven in two registers. The first register chronicles, in the present tense, the development of Boston's Fenway Victory Gardens circa 1943. The second, past tense register articulates a dialectical tie between man and nature as presented through the first literary and visual historical descriptions of 19th century American expansion. This story is eventually carried beyond the borders of the United States, where World War II era pesticides and fertilizer technologies were being deployed in order to grow food on a mass scale. The ensuing "Green Revolution," an American program to combat world hunger, adds yet another dimension to the man/nature dialectic.