All for slowly dying plant genitals.ĭG Right now, the Juliet rose is one of the most coveted flowers by the wealthy elite. The buying and selling of flowers in the United States is a more than thirty-four-billion-dollar industry. I was thinking about beauty as economic capital and how revered flowers are universally, but also the symbolism involved in owning flowers. I was working with thousands of high-end flowers shipped in from all over the world: orchids from Florida, roses from Ecuador, gloriosas from Japan, tulips from the Netherlands, peonies from China, proteas from Africa. I find this insistent prodding between “natural” and “artificial” interesting in this context of flowers, which symbolize what’s earth-given but are synthetic in the ways they’re genetically modified and manufactured by the flower industry.ĭG This was constantly on my mind when I was working in a luxury flower shop for the 1% in Times Square. You coat electrical wires with syrup and collagen and protrude shredded-paper sculptures out of smashed screens. MN The idea of “combining the organic and the digital” recurs in your work. Other videos are altered rose time-lapses, animated roses turning into faces, and the short film The Sextant of The Rose (2019). Another video piece shows three screens that animate half-fictional and half-real stories about experiences working at the flower shop. The body is placed inside a tomb-like sculpture that I see as a monument to the continuity of life, particularly the relationship between the human body and roses. In one of the main videos, there is a flickering body (mine) being overtaken by a colorful time-lapse of plants growing and dying. Overall, there are thirteen videos, which I think of as “the thing.” The shredded-paper pulp creates a texture that references glitch and rose petals, combining the organic with the digital. Real roses rest within the video sculptures and are added to weekly. The sound is soft and coming from above-it’s the soundtrack for the film, which narrates the history of rose cultivation (as narrated by me). Hand-shredded set paper has been turned into pulp and coats each video sculpture. Color is the visual language of the show: pink, orange, green, teal, red, purple, and yellow. Four individual sculptures containing two to three videos each and a projection of a short film are spotlit in the room. Minh NguyenWhat is The Sextant of the Rose? How does a visitor move through it? What do they see and hear?ĭakota GearhartViewers enter the gallery by going down a ramp into a darkened space. In my conversation with her, Gearhart discusses working as a florist for the 1%, the psychedelia of luxury flowers, and roses as allegories of beauty as a survival mechanism. In her latest solo exhibition, The Sextant of the Rose, curated by Alexis Wilkinson at the Knockdown Center, this exuberance is directed at the study of roses. Her vivid, stereogram-like videos are embedded into installations for which the materials list reads like a scavenger hunt at a junkyard (and it is no surprise that Gearhart was once artist-in-residence at a recycling facility): confetti, electrical cords, media players, monitors, metal, aquarium tanks, collagen gel, plaster, electric-shock flytraps, earplugs, and corn syrup. The artist Pipilotti Rist once compared the possibilities of video art to the vastness of a handbag, with “room in them for everything: painting, technology, language, music, lousy flowing pictures, poetry, commotion, premonitions of death, sex, and friendliness.” This spirit reverberates through Dakota Gearhart’s work whose boundless inquiries about ecology, femininity, nature, and intimacy are matched with an explosive approach to form.
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