but you gave me flowers
April 4 - May 7, 2006
Curated by Kendra Paitz
In the green
you will find the immense rose
of Always.
-Federico García Lorca
Flowers stand as a seminal token of romantic love: that corporeal, traditional gift given as a symbolic promise of the bitterly intangible: love, devotion and togetherness. Though emblematic of permanence of affection, they are ultimately disposable. They will sag, wilt, die, and be forgotten.
but you gave me flowers uses sentimental and nostalgic imagery to explore the nature of love and loss, the inundation of emotions and implications that can be produced by one simple gesture. From the excitement and hope of new love in Danielle Gustafson-Sundell’s everlasting gobstopper love (the 2 of us) to longing memory in the aftermath of loss evident in Benjamin Gardner’s only the plum blossoms know me, each work touches upon an oversimplified aspect of these feelings.
The dual nature of the plaid and heart-patterned fabric in Karen Reimer’s Boundary Troubles 1 shows the merging and attachment of two and the complications that can result. Leslie Baum’s Skokie, Untitled, and Untitled (Green Flowers) serve as wistful yet generic reminders of time and place.
The heavy layering of paint and imagery in Benjamin Gardner’s i promised you a rose garden, produces a calmer, strikingly poetic play on the notion of reminiscence and melancholy. The pink-hued patchwork fabric and appliqué flowers of Danielle Gustafson-Sundell’s one perfect iron-on moment sum up the over-sentimentalized, over-romanticized view of love and loss evident in this exhibition.