Residency Projects

What Beautiful Things Can Grow

El Sur, Tlalpan, Mexico City, April 27, 2024. 

Proposal

Gallery Space

Materials:

On the wall, there is a 3 meter x 150 cm painting of flowers in an imperfect, repetitive pattern (See Notes below).

To the side of the painting, there is a table with the following objects: scissors, paper, crayons, paint, markers, brushes, tape. 

Method:

The artist will open the exhibition with an introduction. Viewers/participants will then be invited to take a cutting utensil and cut away a piece of the painting. They can cut any shape or size they’d like and they can take it home. I ask in exchange that they create a flower or multiple flowers to replace what they’ve taken. 

Notes:

Viewers are being asked to participate in an act of destruction, creativity, and exchange. 

We give flowers for so many reasons. To express love or mourning, to show gratitude or appreciation; admiration, kindness, and sometimes we give them just because. Giving flowers can be a congratulatory act, an apologetic act, and on society level, can be interpreted as an act of solidarity, showing compassion and thoughtfulness, a sign that says: we are here with you. I am here with you.

The use of flower symbology can be understood as metaphor for life. The artist goes further to suggest that to continue in life, one needs hope, one needs community, and sometimes, often, both can be found in the ordinariness of daily living, as well as the solace of nature. 

Seemingly repetitive actions produce an outcome that, while similar, are inherently different. This draws on the French Philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s theory on non-substitutable singularities: nothing can be repeated. The different differs from itself in each case. Being is becoming, and everything that exists only becomes and never is. 

Following a traumatic event on the streets of Amsterdam, the artist spent nearly two years in a perennial state of perseverance. One foot in front of the other, as represented by the flower pattern on the canvas. Day after day of the same thing, only different. Repetition is sometimes the only way through something difficult—something unknowable, a change process germinating from within. Here, the artist appreciates that there is beauty in the repetitive, mundane acts of living. Something that feels the same day in and day out has differences in the details.

In replacing the flowers, we grow a garden, a symbol of renewal, hope, and collectively, we find solace in the salve of community relationships. 

The artist lets go of control of her work and how it is transformed via cutting, evoking the necessity of change as a means of progress and metamorphosis, that all birth is necessitated by a violence. Witnessing her work be destroyed is viewed as a violence against herself that she survives. The cutting is an act of interrupting the pattern/cycle of violence/trauma experienced by the artist. Allowing others to help interrupt the pattern moves the artist out of her experience of lifelong ritualised isolation and loneliness. The exchange of flowers is a restorative act, a modus of reparation, a symbol of unity among her self and the viewers. Leaving a flower is a symbolic gesture of collective love and community, requirements for healing and letting go.