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A Fleeting Journey Through the World’s Most Beautiful Greenhouses (Video)

Inspire

If you want to visit the most beautiful greenhouses in the world in a matter of minutes and from home, just press play.

It takes a moment to realize just what is happening here. We find ourselves on a merry-go-round watching a sequence of different greenhouses and splashes of color that at first sight are hard to make out ––but then we realize what they are, yes, strokes of paint.

Joe Hamilton’s video collage Regular Division is an abstract montage of botanical gardens from around the world, with an added layer of floating brush strokes taken from classical landscape paintings. That is, Hamilton puts together a beautiful and unsettling journey that also reminds us that there was a moment in time when we appreciated the natural world through landscape paintings. In Regular Division he reconciles video, the internet and pictorial landscapes.

To gather footage of greenhouses, the artist traveled to twelve countries, including Nepal, Japan, Myanmar and Iceland. He then cut pieces from different landscape paintings he found online. The brushstrokes are used to thread together the different greenhouse panels he filmed in distant places. His spiraling cameo, divided by an iron foundry handrail which spins on a merry-go-round, is a complex and rich adventure of botanical beauty we can take in a matter of minutes, from the comfort of our desk.

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