Impressions of the Flowers Themselves
Co-curated by Chiara Mannarino & Francesca Pessarelli
This September, Curators Chiara Mannarino and Francesca Pessarelli present Impressions of the Flowers Themselves, which takes botanist and cyanotype photographer Anna Atkins’ deep connection and consideration for her botanical subjects as its point of departure. Alina Bliumis, Joseph Liatela, and Joey Rosin align with this empathic relationship to plants and, each in a different way, address the symbolic potential of flowers and their ability to evoke ideas of rebirth, transformation, and utopia.
Bliumis is a research-based artist who approaches historical and political moments through the lens of the natural world. In her series Endangered: Portraits of Flowers, Bliumis gives renewed life and agency to endangered and extinct flowers through portraiture. Hand-carved frames imbue these plants with a sense of personhood and reflect the histories and mythologies associated with them. Many of the flowers Bliumis includes in this series have medicinal or psychedelic properties – their healing and transportive capabilities often leading to their exploitation and extinction.
Liatela is a multidisciplinary artist who uses performance and sculpture to address trans and queer subjectivities and embodiment. His work considers the historical use of flowers in memorials and their inherent symbolism of death and rebirth. In his installation Untitled (Ascension), Liatela applies these concepts to the body, addressing the transitory nature shared by plants and humans and one’s ability to transform over time. His work serves as an altar upon which we commemorate the individuals and parts of ourselves we have lost while looking towards the infinite potential of the reborn self.
Rosin is a musician, sound healer, and budding scent artist. In line with Bliumis’ and Liatela’s exploration of ephemerality and loss, Rosin has created a four-piece sonic landscape entitled Bardo – a Tibetan word that describes the liminal space between death and rebirth. Also by Rosin is Altarpiece – a unique fragrance that will be diffused throughout the exhibition space. Rosin has poetically conceptualized these works as a metaphorical diptych. Harnessing the evocative nature of scent and sound, Rosin’s aim is to encapsulate the beauty of a natural world that no longer exists and will never exist again.
Born in the wake of the Age of Enlightenment, during which historically prevailing notions of the self came into question, Anna Atkins turned such inquiries to the botanical world as well, considering how flora, too, can constitute moral agents. Impressions of the Flowers Themselves seeks to blur and make arbitrary the line between human and botanical life, speaking to the impossibility of extricating ourselves and our ideals from the natural world and its mythologies. The exhibition will act as an altar, a memorial, a meditative space where we can imagine an alternate present, one in which we haven’t lost these literal and figurative flowers and the stories and values they carry with them.
Chiara Mannarino & Francesca Pessarelli, August 2022