Portals | Voids | Stacks brings Stephen Eichhorn’s collage-based works on paper to a new realm of otherworldly experiences not unlike these strange times we’ve all been experiencing. Created over the course of the last 6 months and within our collective self-isolations, these intricately cut out images of cacti, succulents and their accompanying flowers are strategically piled and placed on monochromatic or gradated sheets of paper. 

Growing cacti or succulents or caudiforms relies heavily on delayed gratification. It forces one to learn patience and is frankly a deeper understanding of time in relation to the universe.  – The Lower East Side Cactus & Succulent Society

Eichhorn’s deep interest in these plants goes beyond their aesthetic and virtuous appeal. Just previous to developing the artwork for Portals | Voids | Stacks, and well into the current pandemic, Eichhorn began to collect, cultivating and meditate with living cacti and succulents gathered from all over the world. His curiosity and subsequent education about these plants came as a kind of comforting distraction and the process of cutting and gathering started to take on a different, slower or more deliberate function as a meditative act. From Eichhorn: “In the moment, each component becomes critical with each thorn or flower pedal needing care and attention, as if the paper image was living.”

These portals (a doorway, gate, or other entrance), voids (vacuums of empty space) and stacks (an orderly heap or large pile) offer transitory opportunities to experience a moment in time built by the artist’s hand. Trading foregrounds for backgrounds and vice versa, the cumulative effect may feel slightly uncomfortable, but ultimately the formal graphic approach produces a handmade, or cultivated, visually isolated environment that allows for an experience that implores self-exploration.

Eichhorn’s Plant Studies, an ongoing series and titled in this exhibition as Hybrid Forms I through VIII, offer particularly experimental approaches to the symbiotic relationship between plant and human. Circles, arcs, concentric squares and other shapes are graphically enhanced with vivid swatches of color while cut & delicately piled selections of cacti and succulents. Inferred here is Eichhorn’s dedication to the meditative depths and realms achieved through the making of hybrid forms which exist in the mind’s eye but are extinct in reality. These living plants and cut out plants, coexisting and inspiring, shepherding us through a space and time that seems to be slower and more deliberate, yet constant and still full of wonder.