SECOND NATURE: WORKS FROM THE TROPICS

Victoria Pesce Elliott transforms the overlooked and discarded into art that challenges our relationship with beauty, ownership, and the natural world. A South Florida native who divides her time between Miami Beach and Jamaica's Treasure Beach, Elliott brings three decades of experience as a journalist and food writer to her artistic practice.

Elliott’s full-time immersion into art emerged partially from necessity when the pandemic shuttered the restaurants she wrote about and disrupted supply chains as she built her Jamaican home. A lifelong gardener and cook, she seized this opportunity to delve deeper into nature, where daily walks yielded collections of botanical treasures—seeds, pods, branches, and shells—that became central to her creative vocabulary.

In Second Nature, Elliott explores the tension between handmade, machine-made, and natural elements. The exhibition’s title references not only her materials and career shift but also her lifelong impulse to gather and transform—to recognize potential in what others have overlooked. Her collages feature painted backgrounds layered with organic materials: fruits, flowers, leaves, and preserved food items encased in acrylic. These compositions juxtapose nature’s impermanence against human attempts to control and define it.

Throughout her work, deliberate contradictions emerge. Mirrors positioned at unexpected angles invite reflection while questioning vanity while her light fixtures, sculptures, and vessels—crafted from tree parts—are transformed with layers of paint, acrylic, wax, resin, and brass, blurring boundaries between organic and manufactured, art and function. These works are not trapped behind glass; rather, in an effort to retain some original freedom, they swing from decorative chains or float within frames that attempt to contain them.

Her work poses persistent questions: Can we “improve” upon nature? Can we truly capture, tame, frame, and preserve natural beauty? And what do our attempts to do so reveal about our own fragility?