Gardens

As the 2022-23 artist-in-residence at the Ojai Valley’s 264-acre Taft Gardens & Nature Preserve, she skipped over flourishing blooms, seeking instead the property’s unwanted denizens.

Wheat was fascinated with Taft’s “burn piles” — all the plant matter pulled out by gardeners because it’s “not beautiful enough, not young enough, not fitting enough for the region,” she says. Forlorn, this detritus is stacked, out of sight, in massive piles to go up in flames.

“My works deal with … the spaces where we store outcasts so we can maintain our perceived utopias,” Wheat says. “Botanical gardens are these highly curated spaces where anything that doesn’t meet the author’s eye gets edited out. So I wanted to know where the weeds hang out.”

The Taft Gardens Art in Nature Residency, now in its third year, provides artists with an airy studio and plenty of outdoor inspiration, but doesn’t require them to create pretty paintings of captivating foliage. Instead, artists of all kinds — visual, performance, musical — are invited to “explore the relationship between humans and their environment,” whatever form that takes.

During her nine-month residency, interdisciplinary artist Wheat says she wanted to delve into “human belief systems and how they relate to the natural world.”

In her previous artwork, she’s explored the sociopolitical aspects of gardens and agriculture, such as the colonial history of ornamental citrus gardens as displays of wealth. She also started a farming community in Oregon for people with special needs.