The Floral Impulse

For this exhibition, the curator included artists who naturally intersect with her own practice in concept and/or aesthetics. In painting, sculpture, photography, assemblage, and video, the exhibition contemplates the long history of the floral still life genre and the mythologies, symbolisms, and historical references encoded within pictorial representations of flowers.

From humanity’s earliest recorded histories, the flower has served an intimate, sensual, and visceral role as a subject of allegorical meaning. Florals have long ornamented and bloomed across fundamental aspects of life as expressions of mourning, growth, remembrance, love, beauty, ritual, and resistance. In the inverse, flowers have at times been coded as shallow tokens of adornment or decay. Their uses and representations span time, place, and culture, in many ways forming a familiar and unifying grammar that connects human experience across its myriad conditions.

Artists involved: Michael Adno, Rachael Anderson, Johannes Bosschaert, Se Jong Cho, Petra Cortright, Alejandro Garcia Contreras, Amber Cowan, Maria de los Angeles Rodriguez Jimenez, Timo Fahler, Naomi Fisher, Adler Guerrier, Daniel Gibson, Lyle Ashton Harris, Matthew Day Jackson, Austin Lee, Kalup Linzy, Grant Levy Lucero, Pepe Mar, Jillian Mayer, Nabeeha Mohamed, Cruz Ortiz, Rachel Rose, Devan Shimoyama, Xaviera Simmons, Shinique Smith, Nadir Souirgi, Su Su, and Yesiyu Zhao.