And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
- Anaïs Nin

Alien Spring, Isabelle Albuquerque’s second solo exhibition with Nicodim and her first with the gallery in New York, is a sculptural, erotic meadow populated by biophilic hybrid forms born out of environmental catastrophe and mutated into new life. Albuquerque adapted the title for her new series from Silent Spring, the 1962 book by pioneering ecological writer Rachel Carson, which was an early, radical call to arms for planetary protection.

The exhibition contains a suite of six new steel and bronze sculptures that merge human and floral anatomies into psychologically charged beings “growing” throughout the gallery, enmeshing elements of the human form with the natural landscape. Together in their “meadow,” Alien Spring envisions a more symbiotic future for humanity and the environment from which life is derived.

Mother and Child, the first sculpture in the series, is a five-foot tall stainless steel hybrid human-orchid form that has a complex root system and speaks to the passing of generational knowledge, symbiosis, empathy, and chemical exchange. Sisters, the second, is a stainless steel sculpture with vulvic buds that appear to glide across the floor on its roots. Self, the third, is an intermediate unfolding flower—a self-portrait of the artist reaching toward the sun.

A new series of bronze works complete the ecosystem: Encounter in the light of dawn, Encounter in the light of Dusk, Encounter in her moonlight in each of which flower “couples” are caught in moments of heightened intimacy. Stemming from a lineage of works like Brancusi’s The Kiss and Louise Bourgeois’ The Couple, Encounter in the light of dawn depicts the entanglement between an orchid and anthurium blossom springing forth from the same shared stem. Encounter in the light of Dusk portrays the union between hermaphroditic blooming forms inspired by the eroticism in Robert Mapplethorpe’s and Georgia O'Keefe's floral obsessions. All three sculptures are “painted” with a process that derives color from flame.

Influenced by Darwin’s orchid theories and the artist’s own personal experiences with the flowers that emerged from the scorched earth all around her studio after the Eaton Fires earlier this year, Alien Spring explores coevolution, catastrophe and rebirth, pollination, cross-species intercourse, and hybridity while imagining what new kinds of life and relationships might emerge out of seismic political, personal, and climatic events.