You’ve heard of ‘Wonderland,’ but have you yet ventured to The Rose Garden? John Jarboe’s show at the Fabric Workshop and Museum is her first solo museum exhibition. The Rose Garden is an immersive multimedia cabaret-cum-gallery experience that is joyously campy, increasingly absurdist, and simultaneously tender and nostalgic. The name ‘Rose’ and the presence of rose iconography, among other imagery, are particular odes to Jarboe’s unborn twin sister, whom John consumed in the womb.
Jarboe highlights her own journey of transgender self-actualization through labyrinthine installations of varying domestic scenes reimagined from childhood, and blurs boundaries between fine art and theater through projected time-based media performances that bring the spaces to life. Finally, the gallery also features a ‘Green Room,’ which serves as a venue for live events and other opportunities including a community job center for trans and nonbinary folks called TransWork. Live performances are held throughout the show’s tenure and highlight many of the city’s premier queer artists; I highly recommend that gallery visitors return for this special programming.
We are introduced to The Rose Garden by Rose herself, who invites us into the gallery space, comprised of seven distinct subdivisions with increasingly fantastical landscapes. From familiar early-’90s Midwestern home decor to Wonderlandish scenes of magical realism, each area represents varying moments from John and Rose’s imagined shared experience from womb through present day.
The exhibition as a whole acts as the theater set, the soundstage for Jarboe’s biggest cabaret production yet. And if The Rose Garden is the stage, then the performance is gender in all its beautifully confusing, harrowing, hilarious and emotional moments. The success of this interactive installation lies in the intentionality and multitude of components involved in Jarboe’s expert place-making: from found objects, to textiles and sculptures made in residency with the Fabric Workshop, to the highly collaborative projections comprised of spoken word, musical compositions, and dramaturgy.
Particularly salient to me were the imagery, iconography, and references from art history and pop culture present throughout the show, and their relatable symbolisms: ‘Cannibal’s Gender Soup’ cans found in the kitchen cabinet, reminiscent of Warhol’s serial screenprints; a re-creation of Hitchcock’s Psycho in which John murders Rose, projected onto a shower curtain; a reconstructed “Mother’s Closet” strewn with discarded pumps and pearls after 8-year-old John’s first trials with drag; evidence bags containing toys, videotapes, and books–notably Virgina Woolf’s Orlando–pointing to early signs of queer expression; real and rendered red snapper fish in varying states of butchering and decay, posed with John to resemble Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus.” Each iconic visual contains multiple meanings and holds space for tragedy, triumph, and audience interpretation. Most exemplary are the images of rose and rabbit.
Both the rose and the rabbit act as our guides for the adventure into John and Rose’s shared mind, with trails of mylar rose petals on the ground and bunny figurines carefully curated in display cases and atop surfaces throughout the gallery. A grandfather clock contains rabbit sculptures trapped behind its face, in clear homage to the perpetually tardy rabbit whom Alice follows through ‘Wonderland.’ This symbol of “Mother,” or, “smother,” mentioned in video-sculpture, “Rabbit Stew,” is emblematic of Jarboe’s experience of trauma and repression by her mother’s “Midwestern Denial.” Uniquely, ‘You Still Have Time’ is scrawled across the base of the clock, in antithesis to urgency and restriction, inviting us to accept the slowness of unlearning familial and societal traumas in service of queer self-acceptance. Beyond representing John herself, the rabbit further alludes to queer optimism, symbolizing birth, the cycle of life, and springtime, evoking visuals of newly bloomed flowers like a Rose herself.
My personal favorite piece within the show, called “The Scene of the Crime,” best emphasizes the pervasive iconography of rose and Rose. In the heartbreaking rock ballad music video that animates the sculptures and space itself, Rose sings from inside the uterine wall to a dormant fetal John, by whom she will be tragically eaten: “I was seeded to be seen / I, the most beautiful bloom.” Rose is both entity and metaphor, where “flesh, wax, plant, stem” are the same, as shown by umbilical cords emanating from two identical dirt graves–or flower beds–connecting to twin childhood beds above. At the end of the song, water rains down onto the plots of soil, notably covered with plush rabbits, simulating both the amniotic fluid breaking at John’s birth and the water that fertilizes and allows Rose to self-nourish, germinate for 33 years, and bloom over time within John.
It was my immense honor, as a viewer, to become part of Jarboe’s journey of self discovery, and to viscerally feel Rose’s interconnectedness with John’s experience as a trans person and performer within every element present.
Ultimately, The Rose Garden touches on ideas of death, longing, and nostalgia for memories never created whilst also celebrating queerness, gender identity, and blurred boundaries between blood and chosen families through largely relatable references interspersed with themes specific to Jarboe’s family. Gender is deeply intimate for each of us, and my hope is that the emotional and visceral qualities of The Rose Garden allow visitors to embrace their own and each others’ beautifully diverse identities–”trans folx, queerdos, and genderful ones”–whilst also forming common ground. John Jarboe has gifted us with a space for learning, unlearning, compassion, forgiveness, acceptance, nourishment, and, most importantly, with an exquisite show.
John Jarboe: The Rose Garden, until Sept. 29, 2024, at the Fabric Workshop and Museum.
