Nothing But Flowers

solo exhibition

Stark Gallery, Phoenix, Arizona, October 2015

These pictures began as photographs of flowers in areas cultivated to be enhanced versions of wild or native flora, and of rock piles in spaces both natural and human-altered. From these original photographs, I digitally removed anything not illuminated directly by the sun, then replaced these shadow areas with bright, flat color. Although this process of replacing shadows is straightforward in both idea and technique, the resulting images hit on a complex and unresolvable tension between a vision of stylized and contained nature and the uncontrolled organic chaos of the natural world. 

There was a shopping mall

Now it's all covered with flowers

you've got it, you've got it

If this is paradise

I wish I had a lawnmower

you've got it, you've got it

–Talking Heads, (Nothing But) Flowers