FLORAL STATIC

The floral-themed crafting merchandise of the billion dollar of gift industry —gift bags, tissue paper, wrapping paper, printed scrapbook paper, washi tape, paper punches, and picture frames —all sourced primarily at big box retail and crafting stores, are used to create my heavily layered collages. Floral patterns are broken up into floral shapes which are recombined back into floral patterned backgrounds, all to address the problem of received ideas of beauty.

Conditioned as consumers, we see inventory as “in the now,” when in actuality, each generation of color schemes and patterns are instantly dated. My collages shall be temporally associated; also, in as much as they are non-archival, they will fittingly slowly fade and “wilt.” While this might be considered nostalgic (and a doubling down on sentimentality). they avoid this attribution by being such a hot compositional mess, Instead of cloyingly manipulative, I see them more like a suicide by saccharine aesthetics. The critique comes by way of self-sacrifice to the here and now.