Jennifer Vanderpool’s Hysterical Paradise is a carefully controlled, pristinely crafted venture into lavishness. Vanderpool judiciously goes too far, filling Bandini Art with a hand-crafted garden of Astroturf cut-outs, plastic bag flowers, beaded bushes, duct-tape laden bird baths, and trees of painted cup-holders. The installation undoubtedly seduces. But it also does something else far more gripping.

“A style of decadence is one in which the unity of the book is decomposed to give place to the independence of the page, in which the page is decomposed to give place to the independence of the phrase,” writes Paul Bourget of Charles Baudelaire. Decadence is not an easy style to master, Bourget points out. It requires that an artist constantly struggle against the urge to unite, resolve, and narrate.

Vanderpool’s installation lives in the tension between the parts and the whole. She never downplays the beauty of the individual beads that she’s strung together or the airiness of the tissue paper roses she crafted, yet her work is aware of its own net effect. It references consumerism, excess, nostalgia, feminine kitsch. It explores how personalized extravagances can become depersonalized, distant and self-possessed.

Near the gallery’s entrance, a fountain made of orange industrial buckets gushes like a waterfall even though the contents of the buckets move with much more subtlety than the noise. On the opposite end of the space, a projected image of falling water silently pulsates against the wall. Long strings of ornaments hang from a trellis in the far left corner, deterring viewers from walking under the arch and pushing and pulling between alienation and invitation. Even if the hanging objects momentarily distract, those who want to get through can simply walk around the trellis. Nothing about Vanderpool’s installation is impossible to navigate. She’s achieved the effect of over-stimulation while leaving multiple paths open to her viewers, letting them decide how to interact with her work.

“Is feminism a celebration of the ‘feminine’ or of freedom and optimal choice?” asks artist Collier Schorr. “Clearly, the two are not always the same.” Vanderpool knows this, yet she brings the two together to coexist in all their complexities. She lets a stereotypically feminine visual language indulge in its own nuances, repeating and rephrasing itself over and over again until indulgent repetition becomes a form of freedom.

Here’s why Hysterical Paradise works: it’s a fiction of the best kind, in which the author primarily acts as the conduit through which individual observations and stories come to life. She realizes that presenting the parts will be more forceful than co-opting a series of moments into a single, all-encompassing narrative. It’s through the candor of its parts that fiction moves closer to becoming truth.

-Catherine Wagley