Once in a while, as we discuss the canon of available options, a well-meaning photography angel will recommend a mid-range lens ro mw, telling me it's great for events. "Oh no," I'll say. " I'm not very civilized. I like things really close up, or really far away." As an artist, the official social mid-perspectives of life aren't really my thing. Except, perhaps, as insofar I escape them and indirectly comment upon them with my passion for and habit of abstraction. The empty, the hidden, the peripheral, and the deep. That's my jam.
Here, I hunted plants in the vulnerable and powerful state of full bloom close to the summer solstice. Some grow in my own garden. Others came in armfuls from the florist’s protected walk-in fridge at the height of a heatwave and at the tail end of their natural season, and being curtailed even further by the unexpected and extended heatwave of 2016. Within my rather less protected shooting space, the length of their already precariously shortened life cycle shortened once more. Urgency is the undercurrent of this work.
Beneath the brilliance and extremes of the solstice secrets are hidden in plain sight: the deep, the tender, the folded, the saturated, and the vulnerable. Held as close as a baby’s fist, etched with stories written in scratches, suspended in luminous layers of fluid and velvet color, these plants showed me an unexpected, flowing and strangely articulate language of boundaries and openings, availability and distance that both reveals and keeps secrets. To me these images seem to articulate, and even catalog, micro-stages and nuances of intimacy.
Initially, the dark gray green, bottle-like space that surrounds many of these blooming plants seemed problematic. But one thing it has come to reference is the natural and undefinable space of awareness in which the distilled, brilliantly colored treasures and secrets of our emotions and experience flower, floating temporarily in the vast and fertile yet ultimately unstable medium of time.