Newsletters: Corden|Potts Gallery Spotlights Tom Hawkins The Biggest Garden

In our next exhibit, the gallery will spotlight The Biggest Garden, a platinum/palladium series by Modesto-based photographer Tom Hawkins. The show will run from June 6 to July 20, with a reception on Thursday, June 6 from 5:30 to 7:30 pm.

Corden|Potts Gallery is located at 49 Geary Street, Suite 410, in San Francisco. Gallery hours are Tuesdays through Saturdays, 11 am to 5:30 pm and until 7:30 pm on the first Thursday of the month.

The Biggest Garden, represents Tom's effort to interpret the landscape of the place where he lives, the Central Valley of California, where the ideas of garden and cultivation are expressed on both the largest and most intimate of scales.

This "giant outdoor hothouse," as Joan Didion dubbed it, "exhibits all the elements of the designed landscape," Tom says, "The grove, the framed view, and the movement of water through a canal. The tank houses can be seen as garden follies, and an architectural expression of utility." He continues, saying, "I'm conscious of the fact that my small grove of 50 olive trees is part of a much larger grove."

Within this larger garden, Hawkins' grove is part of a grid of orchards that extends across hundreds of miles. Concrete aqueducts that travel the length of the state supply the water. Its "walls" are mountain ranges on four sides. And, like the gardens of Versailles, the labor of many hands is required to build and maintain these vast industrial 'gardens.'

One of the reasons that Tom is drawn to make photos of this area is that "gardens change, and not only with the seasons. The small farms of the Central Valley are disappearing to accommodate new building development, though much of that development now sits empty."

Tom has exhibited his work nationally as well as internationally at such venues as the Centre Culturel André Malraux in Paris, the New York Academy of Sciences, the Weston Gallery in Carmel and the Catherine Couturier Gallery (formerly the John Cleary Gallery) in Houston. His work was featured in California Northern: A New Regionalism last year, and has appeared in The New York Times, Black and White Magazine and View Camera.

We hope you'll be able to join us on June 6 or at some point before this exhibition closes on July 20.

Liz and Jan