Susan Spiritus Gallery
Upending the traditional still-life, which connotes stability and abundance, these images present vases and flowers that are abraded, ghostly, and disintegrating, mirroring the precarity and uncertainty of contemporary culture while retaining vestiges of beauty and hopefulness. Familiar subjects of the genre, flowers and vases, have historically been coded as feminine, the vessel a metaphor for the womb, the flower symbolic of beauty, youth, and the life cycle. In this series, both associations are disrupted. These still lifes unravel at their edges. What emerges is something more ambiguous and inclusive, reflective of today’s shifting boundaries. Beauty that acknowledges its own instability, vessels that refuse to simply contain.