STRANGE FLOWERS

Artists
Cecile Chong, Elisabeth Condon, Nancy Friedemann, Brece Honeycutt, Amy Lincoln, Judith Linhares, Rebecca Saylor Sack, Chrysanne Stathacos, Jessica Weiss, Jimmy Wright

Organized by Elisabeth Condon
elisabethcondon@gmail.com
917.449.4483

Exhibition Poster: Jessica Weiss GENIE 2014 (detail) Silkscreen, acrylic and collage on canvas 70 x 68 inches

Westbeth Gallery
55 Bethune St. at Washington St., New York, NY 10014
westbethgallery@gmail.com

Exhibition Dates: September 9 – September 30, 2017
Gallery Hours: Wednesday – Sunday 1 – 6 PM

Opening Reception: Saturday, September 9, 6 PM to 8 PM
Gallery Walk-Through with Selected Artists 4:30 – 5:30 PM
(Chong, Honeycutt, Lincoln, Linhares , Sack and Weiss)

Exhibition Statement

In the art and fashion worlds this season, flowers bloom in gallery and museum exhibitions and flourish in upscale window displays, pop-up shop exteriors and a myriad of high-end products from handbags to vases.

Yet beneath their decorative veneer flowers possess a strange morbidity. The desire to encapsulate their beautiful forms is to contain that which cannot be controlled. Michel Houellebecq jokes in The Map and The Territory ( 2010. p17-18) that “the flower’s will to live manifests itself in the dazzling spots of color which break the greenish banalty of the urban landscap, as well as the generally transparent banality of the urban landscape–or at least in municipalities in bloom.” A long-standing custom of sending flowers in the event of illness and death persists. Sadie Stein observes of Childe Hassam’s painting “The Room of Flowers,” 1894, that documents poet Celia Thaxter’s room the year of her demise, that the flowers depicted symbolically replace Thaxter’s body after her death.[1]

Strange Flowers considers what flowers symbolize to artists working with flowers today and who have worked with them a while. What compels artists to utilize flowers? How do flowers function as image, form or structure for each artist, and in a larger context help navigate life? How can frail flowers combat global instability, terror, falsity? Do flowers’ reminder of life’s fleeting beauty inspire artists, or in fact do they perceive flowers as beautiful at all?

[1] Stein, Sadie. On the Island of The Shoals with Celia Thaxter. Paris Review, February 4, 2016.