Let It Grow: Megan Bogonovich’s Mutant Botanicals Take Root
At JLG Projects, at Jane Lombard Gallery, Megan Bogonovich’s sculptures appear as if they have been evolving quietly on their own. They coil, swell, and stretch toward one another, forming a kind of ongoing conversation. Nothing about them seems tentative. Each piece occupies its space with an easy, unforced assurance. The forms might suggest blossoms, plumbing hardware, deep-sea creatures, or retro household contraptions, but none of the associations ever fully land. Their identities remain fluid, shifting, delightfully unpinpointable. That refusal to settle is part of their charm.
I first encountered the Vermont-based artist’s work in 2023 at SPRING/BREAK, where she filled an entire room with these peculiar botanical hybrids. I remember laughing, genuinely, at their mixture of silliness and sincerity. They felt like a direct counterpoint to the polished restraint that so often defines contemporary ceramics. The runs of glaze, the swollen seams, the slight structural wobbles, marks another maker might buff out, were instead embraced. Those irregularities made the work feel awake. They breathed.
In this new exhibition, aptly titled Fertile Ground, there is an echo of artists like Ken Price, whose own ceramic forms hovered between the organic, the synthetic, and the comically intimate. Like Price, Bogonovich lets color and surface behave as extensions of growth rather than decoration. The sculptures here seem to accrue, exfoliate, and push outward from their own internal logic, as if style is something generated from within rather than applied from the outside.
Encountering the new sculptures now, arranged with intention and spaciousness, that irreverent spirit has not vanished. It has grown up. There is still play, but also a honed understanding of how to build complexity through repetition. Many components originate from molds, yet nothing here feels standardized. The repeated elements combine and recombine into singular, exuberant beings. It is accumulation as life force: barnacles layering across a hull, polyps blooming into reef systems, seeds pushing toward germination.
As someone who learned ceramics outside formal training, I recognize the devotion required to stay with clay long enough for it to guide you. Working this way demands patience and a willingness to allow errors to become part of the form. Bogonovich’s sculptures carry that generosity. Beneath the saturated surface and humor, there is a softness, a permission for things to be slightly unwieldy, slightly strange, and all the more compelling for it.
The exhibition coincides with the 30th anniversary of founder Jane Lombard’s art dealing, a fitting moment to celebrate work rooted in renewal and ongoing growth. Perhaps marking continued experimentation and acting as a new way to usher in new modalities of working, the show is part of the gallery’s new initiative, JLG Projects.
In a moment when the art world feels burdened by instability, with markets tightening, institutions shifting, and artists negotiating precarity daily, Fertile Ground, in both form and format, feels unguarded, even joyful. The sculptures do not argue their value. They simply proliferate. Openly. Extravagantly. Without apology. Bogonovich’s world is generative because it resists tidiness. New forms appear where you do not expect them. Things continue. Life persists, abundant, unruly, and strange.
And, if you must know, I did have a favorite.
Here it is:
Megan Bogonovich: Fertile Grounds is on view through December 13, 2025 at Jane Lombard Gallery, 58 White Street, New York, NY 10013.
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