Featuring: Suzanne Bocanegra, Lee Boroson, Kurt Lightner, Joan Linder and Jason Middlebrook.

All create new installations that explore their personal connection to nature while expanding upon an ongoing body of work.

Suzanne Bocanegra is creating drawings of every native North American plant to be displayed in various configurations in a room-sized installation. Her reference for this project is Botanica North America, by Marjorie Harris. Past projects include Brushstrokes in a Victoria Flower Album, based on flowers recorded by amateur artist Henry Terry in his notebook of 1873. In another series, she dissected the Baroque notions of wealth and collecting by examining floral still life paintings by Jan Breughel.

Lee Boroson will be adapting Outer Limit, 2005, to create an environment that fills one of the gallery rooms and refers to microscopic and macrocosmic forces in nature. For many years, he has been developing inflatable sculptures that take over architectural spaces. His work was most recently shown in a solo exhibition at the Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College.

Kurt Lightner explores the historical layers of Wave Hill and surrounding Riverdale in an installation that features overlapping building foundations covered with overgrown vegetation. His collage technique employs painted mylar that is cut and layered to create dense landscape with a strong physical presence. Since graduating from the School of Visual Arts in 2004, he has had a solo exhibition at Clementine Gallery and was included in P.S.1/MoMA’s Greater New York.

Joan Linder’s suite of panorama drawings in pen and ink, on view in the gallery’s sunroom, will examine landscape and architecture. Over the past few years, she has embarked on a series of highly detailed portraits of trees that have been shown at Mixed Greens and White Columns. Her work was recently included in the erotic drawing exhibition at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art.

Jason Middlebrook’s life-sized mosaic tree stump, exhibited outdoors, pays tribute to a majestic, 100-year-old copper beech at Wave Hill that suffered from blight and was cut down this winter. This extends his series of mosaic tree stumps that he exhibited last winter at Sara Meltzer Gallery. As with his previous work, he is exploring the relationship between human activity and the blight that caused the tree’s demise.