TEXT:
Flowers of Romance.
Reading thru the text Simon gave me to accompany my show flowers of romance I thought it could be worth writing about the project and some other things that overlap and compliment it. The start and end of Simon’s writing some up an emotion of love that is both devastating, grounding and mesmerically blissful, a feeling in kin to sun kissed tears and the metallicness of auto tuned popular song, this is somewhat out of context with his overall text, but that is also in keeping with a momentary elusiveness that I hoped to evoke in the project. The vessel like a metaphysial hart, like the moment of romance in flowers. Emotion or poetry, something always imbedded in an object or person but not always at the surface. The album cover of Public Image Limited’s Flowers of romance has always seduced and perplexed me in this way, its gesture of anger and love, but a poetic play anger. It is a puppy love, a finding out the perimeters of emotions for the first time, a coming of age, not of years, but not of a relation or situation. A filtration or setting, kind of, a bit like a germinating yeast culture. Simon’s text has this momentary nature of a nostalgia and of it’s place in a current moment of un said things of contained spaces within mp3 or memory. Flowers have this, in the case of on growing geraniums and Liv and Joshua’s arrangement for the opening of the show. They both talk differently about this moment of poetic gesture, of growth and reflection, of symbology and formalism co-currently. The on growing flowers are still just a gesture of on going dialog or development of ideas and governing structure, the opening arrangement of a joyous moment filtered through the fleeting pleasure of a screen grab. The bottles are this too, a bunch of moments a folder of jpegs interacting with each other like a blog post, and like an internet based moment they seem at least to me like a mist, contained within certain perimeters indeed, but still transcendent, all hanging at the same hight close to the floor, like a long meandering internal dialog printed and with the individual words highlighted or something else. The relations of the bottles are varied, and form dialogs un spoken or un graspable, almost mystically abstract in a non formal sense. Their discardedness a testament to the importance of through away ideas, of belief and faith in oneself and those around her. Of romance and its power momentary on the individual or among their surrounding close ones. Of a recycling of the continual moment, reinterpreting ideas about political structures and personal possibilities within a poetic political dialectic. Thus the inclusion of a themed group show showing this as an extension of practise and an inclusion of others or the moment of engagement with others. The works by Helen, Nick, James, Joshua, and Virginia are an extension of the theme of growth, romance and love. All people who are very close to me in different ways, the frames and subject matter of flowers as a curatorial frame work for them to adhere too as an acceptance of the perimeters of friendship and collaboration, there is a push and pull with these and the highly contained aesthetic of the work made me have these works as a kind of aside to the rest of the show. Although they function with other trains of though and currents that run through the space. The colour of the window frames being a very literal form of this, the taking of a very simular colour to that which Kate Newby used to paint the ledge in her show at Y3K which I then chose to use on the frames in my show. The mirrors also talk of this not being just one body of work or one show (in that it captures the show many times again) of overlap, of repeated gestures and their subtle differences. Of evolution in a rhizomic non linear form, the geraniums symbolise this growth through love, care, or romance in a very straight forward way. But the combination of elements creates this balance, where the un noticed is rewarding too. Politics always interest me more when they have layers of the people involved in them, of misunderstanding or ideas not yet fully formed. This moment of clumsy realisation, of romance is what my praxis in the context of this show was aiming for. Of apprehension and freedom, of a conscious but selfless gesture of opening up to a crush.
Christopher L G Hill 2010-2011