“…I wanted to make him breakfast in bed and watch him light up and watch the green eyes turn hazel, and the gray eyes turn blue, and the brown eyes turn raven. I wanted a hope of a simple complexity, but it never came. I could’ve danced my nights away, head in his chest listening to music that sounded of the work of poets writing about love, death, and flowers, but the promises never came, and I never stopped waiting…”
poets writing about love death and flowers
Artist Statement
Poets Writing About Love, Death, and Flowers is a visual conversation surrounding concepts of love, romanticism, and realism. The work began in response to abstract writing I began about past relationships and romantic goals and desires. In analyzing this writing and internal reflection, I noted the way in which there seemed to be a tension between my desire to romanticize love but always being confronted with the history of trauma and discord that I’ve experienced in romantic relationships. I, then, paired these ideas with Zora Neale Hurston’s quote “trees and plants always look like the people they live with, somehow,” and José Lezama Lima’s quote “cuando el negro come melocotón tiene los ojos azules (when the black man eats a peach, he has blue eyes).” The result becomes an extended metaphor of objects such as: peach pits, dead flowers, leaves, and peeled fruit being used to speak about the romanticism and exoticism of love.
Every photograph of the series is created entirely by black-and-white medium format. These images borrow stylistic aspects from historical still life paintings as well as theater and stage lighting. The scenes are composed of objects being layered in front of the camera. The objects are reused between frames in different manners almost as words are repeated in different stanzas or lines of a poem to maintain rhythm or recall to a previous thought. In composing the images, I placed an emphasis on assuring the objects are all of lower intrinsic value. In doing the aforementioned, the objects also became objects of beauty through form and presentation rather than material preciousness.
In creating the work, I am influenced and referential towards the 17th Century vanitas paintings. The realism with which vanitas paintings were created is a key element I felt I needed to implore within the work. Rather than showing these scenes with romanticized characteristics, each photo uses objects in a manner more recalling of realist paintings: pristine flowers become wilting or dried versions of themselves, peaches are represented solely as peach pits, velour draped backdrops are replaced with plastic bags and tattered cardboard, etc. The state of the objects represents the turmoil of being faced with the realities of love and potential spoils of existing in the world of love.