"Flora (ONT)"

curated by John David O'Brien

with work by
Lisa Adams, Holly Boruck, Phyllis Green,
Noel Korten, Nancy Monk, Jessica Newman-Skrentny
and Karen Reitzel.

            The guiding concept for Flora is to exhibit artwork by artists who work within the visual vocabulary taken from the artistic canons of traditional landscape representation, in order to reveal their thoughts about our complex relationship to nature. They emphasize, arrange, modify, or accent the traditional ways in which landscape is re-presented and therefore go far beyond a direct copy of nature.
            The artists selected for this exhibition work with a mixture of drawings, paintings, mixed-media works and smaller sculpture to explore their different notions of flora. These artists have all been working autonomously with this theme, in some cases for many years.
            Each artist has assembled a set of artworks to be exhibited in the display cases that shed light on their rationale and use of flora as a metaphorical device to talk about the extended interactions we have with nature. While some of the artwork is celebratory, others contain signs of distress and even admonitions about the danger of disrupting natural processes. In all cases, these artists are significant practitioners of the contemporary visual arts and by that, I mean that the conceptual underpinnings are not in opposition to the idea of a significant visual experience in which beauty can play an important part.