Preview
BEYOND THE BEAUTY
Runs until April 25
Nickle Arts Museum
Floral imagery is often given short shrift by the art world. Deemed decorative at best and sentimental at worst, the flower is ignored by "serious" artists.
At least, that’s the common perception and it’s something that curators Lynda Snider and Peter Savage were thinking about when they created Beyond the Beauty, an exhibition at the Nickle Arts Museum centred on the use of floral imagery.
"The idea to use floral imagery stemmed from comments one hears regarding flower paintings," says Snider. "Very often the comment is, ‘I want more subject matter, more serious work, not just flowers.’ We decided to take people beyond the beauty, beneath the surface and hopefully to realize there is content beyond the surface."
The curators looked at the uses of floral imagery throughout history and what they found was inspiring. From Egyptian burial temples to Peter Max pop images created during the heady Flower Power days of the 1960s, floral imagery has been used to both depict surface beauty and examine the broad underpinnings of human activity.
With their thesis backed up by the annals of time, Snider and Savage began contacting Calgary’s galleries and private collectors in search of the art for Beyond the Beauty. They have included diverse works in mediums ranging from painting to video.
Shelley Ouellet, a local artist and former director of Stride Gallery, offers up a piece called The Quilt. It’s a large image of a rose that’s made up of hundreds of ribbons. Ouellet’s background includes training as a painter and printmaker, but this work demonstrates her continuing association with conceptually based installations.
"It speaks to a ‘woman’s work’ and looks to imbue it with proper importance," says Snider. "The coloured ribbons have their own language and speak to social issues – red for HIV-AIDS, pink for the fight against breast cancer, yellow for missing people, etc."
Other work that elevates floral imagery beyond surface beauty comes from photographer Karl Blossfeldt (1865-1932), an important artist whose detailed photographic prints of flowers and plants pre-date the widely celebrated works of Robert Mapplethorpe by nearly 100 years.
As a teenager, Blossfeldt attended an industrial arts and design school in Berlin and was taught to cast exacting metal models of plants for later use by other craftsmen. That training led to his fascination with the minutiae of botany and how to best capture each specimen on film.
What a piece like Blossfeldt’s Wundergarten der Natur-1932 shows is that by coupling an encyclopedic knowledge of plant life with the lush photogravure printing process, a photograph of a flower is not only beautiful but can come to represent the ideals – such as mechanical precision and orderliness – of a culture.
"We wanted the public to have a dialogue with these works and decide for themselves if they are art or science, medicine, adventure, religion, politics, social issues, heraldry, life reminders or, in the final analysis, just pretty pictures," says Snider. "It’s always best to let the viewer decide." |
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