Overtaking every nook and cranny of the gallery-including the ceiling-Vanderpool's most recent large-scale installation fills the space with a garden of manufactured delights, reusing, recycling and reappropriating materials as vast as vintage fabric, plastic bags, her great grandmother's costume jewelry, and even detritus scraped from the floor of her previous exhibitions. Video components featuring floating 3-D shapes are expertly integrated into larger piece, adding a multi-media element that contrasts with handcrafted objects like painted recyled wallpaper, plastic flower bouquets and Styrofoam towers. Painstakingly assembled with almost every artificial element available, Hysterical Paradise is a veritable wonderland of the unnatural in all of its manufactured glory.

The exhibition is hysterical in the sense that Vanderpool's over-the-top, baroque style highlights the overzealous impulse of collecting. At the same time, the work also showcases Vanderpool's incredible knack for editing and reinvention. While on the surface her work overwhelms in its garishness, every bauble hot glued and every pipe cleaner bent is placed with intention, and by doing so, given a new purpose as an object of beauty. Whether that definition of beauty derives from a traditional, gender specific tradition related to homemaking and decoration or as a manifestation of truth is up for debate.  

- Heather Jeno