Amanda Besl: Temple of Hortus
Amanda Besl, Temple of Hortus (still), 2025. Digital film. Courtesy of the artist.
In Temple of Hortus, Amanda Besl’s multimedia practice coalesces into a multilayered ode to the humble houseplant. Humans have created codependent relationships with the plants in our care—they rely on us for food and nutrients, and we arrange them to suit our whims. Houseplants give back oxygen and beauty, and we design our built environment to accommodate them. Cyclically, through hybridization, we make them even more reliant on us. The plants we cajole into growth bear the long and continuing legacies of colonialism, extraction, and ownership. Who is “allowed” to cultivate and collect? What makes a plant desirable to a person? How is “invasiveness” defined?
Besl’s paintings, videos, and sculptures explore these questions in an immersive installation, creating a hortus—or garden—temple within which to contemplate human intervention and the blurred lines between the natural and artificial. The central piece of the exhibition, a greenhouse flanked by human-sized stamen, suggests the experience of entering a flower’s pistil. Visitors are drawn into this botanical environment like pollinators, enticed by a looping kaleidoscopic video projection. Beyond the temple, crocheted Spanish moss, grow light-esque pink tones, bell jars, and a series of paintings and sculptures reimagine the cultivation of hybridized plants. Temple of Hortus brings together surreal and eco-gothic elements to help us reconsider the plants that we know so well…or think we do.
Amanda Besl is a painter and experimental filmmaker based in Buffalo, NY. She has exhibited widely throughout New York State as well as in Belgium, France, the Netherlands, and Russia. Besl holds an MFA in Painting from Cranbrook Academy of Art, (Bloomfield Hills, MI) and a BFA from SUNY Oswego.
Her paintings are part of several notable private and public collections including the Burchfield Penney Art Center, Buffalo; Nichido Contemporary, Tokyo, Japan; the Burger Collection, Hong Kong; and the Tullman Collection, Chicago. Besl uses natural history as a platform to explore social issues. She was awarded a 2024 New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) grant for Temple of Hortus. Besl is represented by Resource:Art.
Curated by Anna Wager, UB Art Galleries Curator of Exhibitions.