The "machine in the garden" is a metaphor that has helped me understand the complexity of the urgent struggle we face to be better stewards of our planet earth. I have used that metaphor as the animating concept for the work that appears in this exhibition in four different variations on the theme.

I have tried to make art that reminds us of the redemptive beauty of the natural world (the garden) while at the same time acknowledges our dependency on the tools we use (the machine) that are tearing our world apart. I believe there is a role for art to remind us that beauty and justice are parts of the same whole. The whole that is also called love. How do we find a way to receive the earth as a gift and to love it more? It may all turn on affection, as the writer Wendell Berry suggests.

–Gregory Spaid