On view in the passageway lightbox at 42 St–Bryant Park station are selections from artist Nina Katchadourian's "Fake Plants" project. These inventive constructions are hybrid “botanical” specimens that blend memory, imagination, and humor.

The photographs document an ongoing series of sculptures Katchadourian began during the height of the COVID-19 lockdown. Working with items at hand in her home, studio, or found near her daily surroundings, she developed a tactile process of experimenting with humble materials to explore their possibilities. Some works carry personal resonance—such as the use of N95 masks—while others incorporate playful choices, such as transforming the image on a box of frozen spinach into leafy ferns.

Through cutting, pinning, bending, and assembling, Katchadourian reshapes disposable materials into unexpected botanical forms. Items such as cardboard packaging, paper scraps, toothpicks, and ping pong balls are given new presence, their everyday origins still visible beneath the transformation.

In the station mezzanine, the artworks appear larger than life. Each plant is photographed against a stark black background and aligned along a shared horizon line, forming a tableau of invented species. At first glance, passersby may connect the imagery to the greenery of Bryant Park above. With closer looking—or on repeated encounters—viewers may begin to recognize familiar materials, gaining an appreciation for both the ordinary objects and the artistic process that reshaped them. The installation offers a moment of curiosity within the commute, prompting viewers to consider how creativity can emerge from the simplest of sources.

The exhibition was generously sponsored by Griffin Editions and DotWorks with installation support by OUTFRONT Media. 

Nina Katchadourian is an interdisciplinary artist whose work includes video, performance, sound, sculpture, photography and public projects. Her video "Accent Elimination" was included at the 2015 Venice Biennale in the Armenian pavilion, which won the Golden Lion for Best National Participation. Group exhibitions have included shows at the Serpentine Gallery, Turner Contemporary, de Appel, Palais de Tokyo, Istanbul Museum of Modern Art, Turku Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, ICA Philadelphia, Brooklyn Museum, Artists Space, SculptureCenter, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Morgan Library, and MoMA PS1. A solo museum survey of her work entitled "Curiouser" opened at the Blanton Museum in 2017 and traveled to the Cantor Art Center at Stanford University and the BYU Art Museum. An accompanying monograph, also entitled "Curiouser," is available from Tower Books.

Katchadourian completed a commission entitled "Floater Theater" for the Exploratorium in San Francisco in 2016 which is now permanently on view. In 2016 Katchadourian created "Dust Gathering," an audio tour on the subject of dust, for the Museum of Modern Art as part of their program "Artists Experiment. Katchadourian's work is held in public and private collections including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Blanton Museum of Art, Morgan Library, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Margulies Collection, and Saatchi Gallery. She has won grants and awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Anonymous Was a Woman Foundation, the Tiffany Foundation, the American-Scandinavian Foundation, Gronqvista Foundation, and the Nancy Graves Foundation. Katchadourian lives and works in Brooklyn and Berlin and is a Clinical Full Professor on the faculty of NYU Gallatin. She is represented by Catharine Clark Gallery.