Rebecca Brewer Veit Laurent Kurz Locus Amoenus: Extinct Flame

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Image courtesy of Catriona Jeffries Gallery

Rebecca Brewer, "Science Glass," 2023, oil on panel, 20" x 30"

Rebecca Brewer and Veit Laurent Kurz Locus Amoenus: Extinct Flame at Catriona Jeffries

The installation runs July 9–26, 2025

Rebecca Brewer and Veit Laurent Kurz’s Locus Amoenus: Extinct Flame is a site-specific, cultivated pond delineated by an impassive phosphorescent cube. The vignette emphasizes a modest grotto which rises above the self-oxygenating pool, where a small flame continually burns. This gesture of an everlasting flame emerges from the barren courtyard––itself located amidst the neighbourhood’s warehouse district where screeching trains and skeletal construction sites have scattered building debris—but is not intended to function as any kind of remediative project. Instead, the installation invites the viewer into a theatrical engagement with nature’s quiet detail; a state of reflection which typically evokes the dimensions of the sacred now borders on camp.

Brewer and Kurz’s installation draws from the sottobosco painting tradition, which typically depicts floral undergrowth and “lower orders” of creatures and insects who occupy the liminal and brackish spaces of a given environment. Further, the phrase locus amoenus refers to the ideological segregation of a cultivated garden space from urban conditions, creating a state of exception within the narrow confines of a domestic garden. Physically demarcated by assertive, minimalist geometry, the space now hovers between the real and the virtual—a boundary that diminishes as one attends to the quiet life of the plants and pollinators within. It remains uncertain whether the boundary attempts to cage or to emphasize the biome within.