NEW FARMER | BRUCE EESLY

A ‘living nature’ is what Peter Trimmel proudly showcases: the vegetable that this well-dressed and groomed twelve-year-old holds like a trophy is a decidedly oversized version of a common fennel. With muted colors and a patina reminiscent of 1950s studio photos, everything brings us into a dimension of celebrating success and the magnificent opportunities offered by a ‘green revolution’ that transforms traditional agriculture—understood as a minimal practice reliant on natural cycles—into massive production with increasingly advanced techniques and technologies.
And advanced is the model of the New Farmer that Eesily presents to us, a sophistication that should be interpreted with all shades of meaning, both positive and negative: elegant, refined, polished… but also altered, counterfeit, manipulated.
Eesily’s series moves and guides us along this dual track, captivating us with aesthetically pleasing, seductive, reassuring, and promising images of a world where pumpkins and cabbages surround us in a harmonious and joyful dance. At the same time, it subtly, yet clearly, induces doubt. These vegetables, so common that they require little scrutiny or questioning, populate a scene that is unsettling and artificial, almost sinister in its perfection.

With an evident and equally ironic reference to the FARM Security Administration ‘operation,’ Eesily imagines and constructs a contemporary campaign to map pseudo-rural—and thus unknown—areas of today, those that exist exclusively in technological environments. Contemporary artificial worlds are not those of ‘machines’ but more invisible and pervasive, the result of a fusion between human imagination and combinatorial calculation. The question is no longer to whom or what to believe—photography, science, nature…—but whether we still have the space, as human beings, to exercise and develop that distinctly human capacity for critical thinking. Or, at the very least, to not suspend it and risk finding ourselves searching for children under cabbages…

The artwork is part of the exhibition “Bruce Eesly – New Farmer” hosted at Croisière for the 2024 edition of the Rencontres d’Arles festival, July 1–September 29, 2024.

Bruce Eesly
Peter Trimmel wins first prize for his UHY fennel at the Kooma Giants Show in Limburg, 1956, New Farmer series, 2023
Courtesy of the artist

11/09/24