On View through December 15, 2025
Brandon Ndife [12]
Decline
Brandon Ndife, Decline, 2025
red oak, maple, and tulipwood, pigment, spar varnish
Documentation
About
Brandon Ndife
Decline, 2025
red oak, maple, and tulipwood, pigment, spar varnish
Silver Eel Cove, Fishers Island, NY
Brandon Ndife’s sculptures merge domestic debris with botanical forms, creating uncanny hybrids that feel both alive and haunted. Furniture, foliage, and architectural fragments coalesce in forms that hover between the organic and the fabricated. His work conjures the aftermath of upheaval — moments when nature reclaims the built environment and memory embeds itself in matter. Decline, the twelfth public sculpture commissioned by Lighthouse Works for Fishers Island, continues this exploration using materials drawn from the island itself and shaped by the accumulated memories of its community.
The sculpture takes the form of a fallen, hollow tree, nine feet in length, anchored by a sprawling, unearthed root structure measuring ten feet across. The work’s trunk is crafted from three species of wood — red oak, maple, and tulip — all sourced from trees previously felled on the island. Decline is studded with fragments of domestic life: tables, chairs, shutters, and banisters donated by Fishers Island residents. These salvaged objects appear partially consumed by the sculpture’s trunk, as if the tree had absorbed them slowly over time. Their presence is neither decorative nor nostalgic, but integral, recasting the work as a kind of communal reliquary. What emerges is not just a downed tree, but a portrait of a place and the fragile bond between human and natural histories.
Decline is held in mid-descent by a steel armature. The work is situated atop a concrete plinth at the edge of Silver Eel Cove, a threshold space where land, water, and sky converge. In this liminal setting, Decline becomes a quiet monument to impermanence: a sculptural gesture that reflects the beauty and inevitability of natural and social transformation.
Rooted in the island’s ecological and human past, Decline offers a space for reflection. The work asks us to look closely — not just at what has been lost, but at what remains embedded, alive, and intertwined.
Artist
Bio
Brandon Ndife (b. 1991, Hammond, Indiana) lives and works in New York. Recent solo exhibitions include Greene Naftali, New York (2024); Matthew Brown Gallery, Los Angeles (2022); Storm King Art Center, New Windsor, New York (2022); Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery, Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut (2022); Bureau, New York (2020, 2019); Shoot the Lobster, New York (2018); and Interstate Projects, Brooklyn (2016). Ndife’s work is currently on view in the exhibition, A Garden of Promise and Dissent, at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut. Other notable group exhibitions include the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2023); Greene Naftali, New York (2023); Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Sint-Martens-Latem, Belgium (2022); Soft Water Hard Stone, New Museum Triennial, New York (2021); and the Aspen Art Museum (2020). A graduate of The Cooper Union and Bard College MFA, Ndife has work in the permanent collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art and The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York.
