Virginia Poundstone “Total Meltdown”
Kansas
This event has ended.
KANSAS presents a solo exhibition of Virginia Poundstone.
In her current exhibition, Virginia Poundstone continues more than six years of engagement with the economic, art historical and botanical life of flowers. Elaborating on the common symbology of her subject, Poundstone’s newest works reclaim the traditions of Memento Mori and pressed flower craft, as well as the floral still lives of 16th Century Dutch painter Rachel Ruysch. These historical references combine with vinyl printing, commercial photography, cast bronze and hot worked glass, inscribing both the speed of contemporary exchange and themes of preservation and death into the very materials of Poundstone’s works.
TOTAL MELTDOWN revolves around an FTD floral arrangement once sent to the artist as a gift. Poundstone was struck by the generic and lifeless quality of the flowers, relative to both their wild origins and the industry responsible for transforming them into on demand commodities. As a first gesture, Poundstone made plaster impressions of the flowers and turned the resulting fragments into cast bronze forms. Topped with poured molten glass, these Flower Arrangements “fossilize” the bouquet, presenting geologic indices of the agricultural product’s truncated life.
Counterpoising the durability of the bronze and glass “fossils” is a series of fragile wall pieces comprised of pressed commercial rose petals. These works stem from Poundstone’s research into pressed flowers: their applications in botanical study, for example, and their artistic migration. Originating in 16th Century Japan, flower pressing became a leisure activity in Victorian England and an eventual staple of American craft circles. Poundstone departs from the illustrative ends of this tradition, however, to focus on aesthetic effects of the flowers themselves; her petals are arrayed in a loose weave, depicting nothing other than their gradual rot.
To produce two final series, Poundstone worked with a commercial photographer on stock-style photographs of the FTD floral arrangement. The artist printed these images on the perforated vinyl that normally wraps cars and buses with advertisements, exploiting its one-way, see-through effects by wrapping and wrinkling the material around plate glass. In an urgent and aggressive manner, Poundstone folds the banal images into states of self-abstraction. The works Memento Mori on Top and Memento Mori on Bottom employ both sides of the vinyl as grounds for pressed bouquets, explicitly drawing on the flower paintings of Ruysch. Barred from depicting the male nude and therefore excluded from the tradition of history painting, the Dutch artist’s investment in the floral still life took on a quality of dissent. By bringing Ruysch to bear on her latest works, Poundstone builds upon a centuries old investigation of the cultural significance of flowers. This investigation is, as yet, unfinished.
- Tyler Coburn
Virginia Poundstone (b. 1977, Kentucky) has exhibited at numerous galleries and institutions, including Cleopatra’s, New York; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York; Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York; Sculpture Center, New York; and Night Gallery, Los Angeles. In 2013, she was awarded The Howard Foundation Fellowship and the Agnes Varis Fellowship at Urban Glass. She will be the subject of a forthcoming solo exhibition at Locust Projects, Miami in January 2014. Poundstone received a BA/BFA in Writing and Fine Arts from Eugene Lang College and Parsons School of Design at The New School for Social Research, and an MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University. She lives and works in New York and teaches at Parsons The New School of Design and the Maryland Institute College of the Arts in Baltimore.
[Image: Virginia Poundstone “Flower Arrangement #1” (2013) bronze and glass, 4 x 7 3/4 x 4 in., Photo: Cathy Carver]
Media
Schedule
from September 13, 2013 to October 19, 2013
Opening Reception on 2013-09-13 from 18:00 to 20:00