Postmortem examination: Oakland - In the Greenhouse Ruins

Twilight had just set in when I arrived at Oakland Cemetery last Friday evening for Cooper Sanchez’s one-night-only painting/planting installation Oakland: In the Greenhouse Ruins. From the entrance on Memorial Drive, flickering white paper-bag lanterns lined the cemetery’s weathered walkways on a path that snaked through the graveyard and opened up on its northern half at the old greenhouse ruins.

Spirituals and jazz hummed from unseen speakers while an every-ages crowd swarmed in and out of the shed and through the greenhouse’s adjacent remains. For Oakland, Sanchez installed 13 paintings in and around the building and its accompanying ruins, and about 30 cyanotype (old-school photographic blueprints) lightboxes inside the roofed structure. The lightboxes illuminated the ghosts of flora and fauna past from the artist’s meadow in Clarkston: wraithlike strands of grass, the gossamer wings of a butterfly, the vacant skull of a small field creature. The plants had been photosynthesized in a whole new light, and the effect was sublime.