Fleurs du Mal
from a statement by curator Hugh Margerum

For centuries the flower has been used as a potent symbol in poetry and art. In paintings of the renaissance the lily symbolized the purity of the Virgin, for the Dutch still life painters, it was the flower as “memento mori”, a reminder to viewers of life’s transience. In more recent times, artists as diverse as Georgia O’Keefe, Andy Warhol, and Robert Mapplethorpe have expanded on the traditional symbolism and have added their images to the iconography associated with flowers.

The title for this show is taken from the famous collection of poems by Charles Baudelaire published in 1857. The exhibition, “Fleurs du Mal” shares with the nineteenth century poet, a fascination for finding beauty in the artificial, the crude, and aspects of life deemed un-worthy of artistic consideration. By virtue of it’s reflection upon the time in which it was created, Baudelaire’s work is considered by many to have ushered in the modern era in art.

The “flowers” in this exhibition are tied together by their exploration of the tension that arises between the natural and the artificial, and by the acknowledgement of their contemporary-ness; the fact that they are ‘fake flowers’… Additionally, and in case we are inclined to take these “Flowers of Evil” too seriously, (the origins of the word ‘evil’ signified nothing more sinister than ‘uppity’) there seems to be at least a trace of tongue-in-cheek humor present in nearly all of the work on view.

In many of these pieces a first glance does not reveal aspects of artifice or tension. It is upon closer examination that one notices Jeanne Patterson’s mute undersea anemones are made from ordinary scouring pads, that Maxine Hayt’s delicate sculptures are built upon shark’s jaws and still contain the vicious-looking teeth, and that Terri Friedman’s brightly colored felt pod ‘breathes’ ominously. LC Armstrong’s floral landscapes are all the more unsettling when we realize that the spindly stems are the tracks of burned bomb fuses. Beyond the jewel-like beauty of Maura Bendett’s resin wall pieces lies a kitschy homage to television sci-fi alien blooms. Hillary Mushkin’s video investigations contrasts live action undersea flowers with their imaginary animated counterparts from the unconscious. It is the manipulation of scale and color that serve to emphasize the divide of natural and artificial elements in Ellen Birrell’s digital photo images with their ‘Arizona Highways’ colors and topographic detail, and also in the ‘fake’ colors of Sabina Ott’s lush paintings with their bas-relief, impastoed paint amid cartoonish flowers.

Without making a judgement on the current state of affairs, these artists reflect the fact that the influence of nature in our lives is increasingly in competition with the high-tech tools and distractions that surround us. In addition to the fact that they may be beautiful as objects, it is the tensions in these ‘flowers’ that make the pieces in this show all the more compelling and very much of their time.