Strange Flowers

Strange Flowers

Lately in the art and fashion worlds flowers are resurgent and resplendent. In galleries, museums, on wallpapers, pop-up shop exteriors, upscale window displays and products, bouquets and patterns project a vibrant yet nostalgic mood. 

 

Handbags and paintings alike proliferate with blooms, yet beneath their decorative veneer flowers possess a strange morbidity. The long-standing custom of sending flowers in the event of illness and death persists. Flowers, in the case of Childe Hassam’s painting of poet Celia Thaxter’s “The Room of Flowers,” 1894, symbolically replace Thaxter’s body after her death.[1]

 

Strange Flowers considers what meanings flowers symbolize by presenting a range of artists working with flowers today. What compels these artists to utilize flowers? How do flowers function as form and structure for these artists and in a larger context help them navigate life experience? How do flowers relate to this time of global instability, terror and falsity? Do artists working with flowers feel inspired by their fleeting beauty or do they perceive flowers to be beautiful at all?