Flowers and Photography Exhibition Opens

McMaster Museum of Art presents:

Flowers and Photography

Sara Angelucci
Barbara Astman
Suzy Lake
Sasha Yungju Lee
Dyan Marie
Lori Newdick

May 9 – August 17, 2013
Curated by Carla Garnet
Organized in collaboration with the Art Gallery of Peterborough

RECEPTION AND CATALOGUE LAUNCH

Saturday, July 20 from 2 – 4 pm

Flowers and Photography invites viewers to consider why flowers continue to be a favourite subject of women artists. Enlisting the garden subject as one that is reflective of contemporary theories about art, nature and the ordering of knowledge, the show features the art of Sara Angelucci, Barbara Astman, Suzy Lake, Sasha Yungju Lee, Dyan Marie and Lori Newdick.

In Regular 8, photo and video artist Sara Angelucci meticulously constructs a fictional archive of events that take place in park-like gardens using digital means to simulate the look of analog documents – or what we recognize as a snap shot. Senior artist Barbara Astman engages photography with new media to sequentially stage her allegorical black and white photomurals, nearsofar, which show the figure in the garden as emblematic of systems of gender perspectives and representation. Sasha Yungju Lee’s work reflects her experience of displacement and self. Her piece, In the Bosom, is essentially a blown up snap shot of her child, Zoe. This photo shows her daughter with arms opened to embrace the leaves and flowers, not unlike a contemporary vision of the mythological goddess Flora.

A pioneer in feminist performance for the camera, Suzy Lake took up photography in order to explore the politics of gender, the body and identity. Lake’s triptych, Peonies and the Lido, holds a mirror to the self as it tempts (and resists) the obsession with youthfulness. Her video, Dance to Life, avails flowers to re-enact the closing stages of a marriage as so much surplus emotion. Dyan Marie’s relational art practice includes photo-based work, as well as performance and publishing initiatives that reflect on contemporary cultural experience. Her Murmurs and Messages series comprises digitally developed images of flowers, in which those vines and plants are seeded with single word poems. Lori Newdick is known for her beautiful and seductive images that capture the space between herself and her subject. Her 2010-2012 Untitled Flowers series captures something akin to surrealism’s deconstructive formlessness.