Imagine nature got hacked. If it could rewrite its own DNA—absorbing industrial waste, pixels, and plastic—what would it become? Welcome to Biophilia. This six-artist exhibition at the Flinn Gallery in Greenwich, CT, curated by Ellen Hawley, doesn’t just depict nature—it reimagines and reconstructs it. The organic and the artificial no longer exist as opposites. Featuring Carol Bouyoucos, Julie Evans, Loren Eiferman, Christina Massey, Heide Follin, and Sui Park, Biophilia brings together artists who push past nostalgia for an untouched Eden to present nature as something restless, resilient, and constantly evolving. The result is a visual feast—bold, kinetic, and utterly alive. This is no polite, whisper-in-the-gallery experience. It lunges, sprawls, and twists. It pulses with energy, daring you to chase its shifting forms.
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A leading artist in the post-photographic scene, Carol Bouyoucos openly embraces AI in her creative process, producing breathtaking results. Forget any lingering snobbery about AI-generated art—Bouyoucos isn’t just using AI; she’s making it hallucinate nature. These prints don’t depict the world; they fabricate a whole new one. Her digital prints Gummy Shrooms and Swamp Blooms feel like artifacts from an evolutionary glitch, where fungi glow with neon auras and plant life is reborn through a high-tech hallucination. She doesn’t just question how technology alters our perception of nature—she upends the entire concept of what we call “natural.”
Meanwhile, Julie Evans, a longtime painter deeply influenced by her travels to India, has, in recent years, veered into fantastical botanical ceramics, making trouble in all the best ways. Honey, her glazed sculpture, at first appears delicate, perhaps a flower, perhaps a fossilized bloom. But look again. No, really stare. It’s something else entirely. It sits in the thrilling limbo of transformation—blooming, dissolving, mutating in real-time. It refuses easy categorization, as if caught mid-metamorphosis. The same goes for her other works included in the show: Sentient Sentinel and C’mon C’mon.
Dominating the back wall of the Flinn Gallery are Loren Eiferman’s sculptures, eerie tributes to the Voynich Manuscript, a mysterious 15th-century book filled with illustrations of plants that don’t exist. Eiferman breathes life into these impossible botanies, sculpting them from salvaged wood with the precision of a scientist chronicling a newly discovered species. It’s as if these imagined plants refused to stay confined to history—they’re here now, demanding their place in the natural order.
Her piece Nature Will Heal/Flower stands apart from this series but plays with similar ideas: the future of flora not as it was, but as it might become. Built from salvaged wood, it suggests an alternate timeline where trees have evolved to incorporate our refuse—and somehow, against all odds, flourished anyway.
Christina Massey doesn’t wait for nature to figure out how to evolve in an industrial world—she fast-forwards the process. In Clairaperennial 10, scrap metal and flattened craft beer cans refuse to be discarded as waste, instead finding new life alongside handblown glass, which lends an almost biological elegance to the piece. This isn’t upcycling in the twee Etsy sense—there’s nothing polite about it. It’s as if aluminum and flora met in an underground art lab and struck a pact, creating sculptures that feel simultaneously organic and entirely unnatural.
Meanwhile, Heide Follin channels nature’s unpredictability. Twists in the Passage, acrylic, and Flashe paint on cradled birch board, is a swirling, kinetic storm of color and texture—an image in constant flux, mimicking the organic world’s refusal to stay the same. Communing #1, acrylic on gessoed watercolor paper, extends the conversation, capturing perpetual motion and transformation. Follin’s works don’t simply depict nature—they echo its pulse.
Are Sui Park’s sculptures really just sitting there like well-behaved gallery pieces? Look again. They loom, they coil—they wait. Constructed from new, hand-dyed zip ties, her works seem to push up from the soil like biomorphic forms anticipating bloom. More familiar forms to us might be the first stirrings of daffodils or tulips in early spring. But as they push through the earth, what form will they take? These seem to grow arms, perhaps carrying another form of intelligence with them.
With its intricate webbed structure, Fermented Mixture looks ancient and eerily new, as if it were dredged from an ocean trench and immediately classified as something not of this world. “I find inspiration in things often overlooked,” Park says. Her sculptures don’t mimic nature—they infiltrate it. They suggest a future where human-made materials aren’t intrusions on the environment, but part of its evolution.
Curious to dive deeper than just, “Wait, is that really made of craft beer cans?”
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The Flinn Gallery invites you to an in-depth artist talk on Sunday, March 30, at 2 PM, featuring Bouyoucos, Eiferman, Follin, Massey, and Park, moderated by curator Ellen Hawley. Expect a lively conversation exploring the blurred lines between nature and art, materiality, and the ever-expanding definition of what is “natural.”
Biophilia is on view at the Flinn Gallery, Greenwich, CT, through April 30, 2025.
About the writer: Laurie Gwen Shapiro is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and journalist whose arts and culture writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, New York Magazine, The Daily Beast, Slate, and others. She is an adjunct professor of journalism at The NYU Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute in the graduate program. Her latest nonfiction book, The Aviator and the Showman: Amelia Earhart, George Putnam, and the Marriage that Made an American Icon will be published on July 15th, 2025 by Viking Press.