The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum: Virginia Poundstone: Flower Mutations

Virginia Poundstone – Flower Mutations

Virginia Poundstone: Flower Mutations

Virginia Poundstone’s practice spans photography, sculpture, video, and installation, and is exclusively focused on the history and botany of the flower and its socio-economic and cultural significance.

Her exhibition at The Aldrich is dedicated to two important sources of inspiration: Giacomo Balla’s series of Futurist Flowers and traditional American flower-pattern quilts. Poundstone debuts a new outdoor sculpture, Quilt Square (Tulip) (2015), and an earthwork, Tulips (2014–15), on the Museum’s grounds; in an interior room, artworks and objects investigate the visual representation of flowers through abstraction in art and design. The outdoor sculpture, a geometric flower in stone and glass nearly eight feet tall, is based on the geometry of a traditional quilt pattern. Placed in the interior courtyard, where it is visible from within the Museum’s Leir Atrium, it is seen for a fleeting period in relation to a field of colorful tulips (more than three thousand bulbs were planted in eight dynamic hues) forming a resplendent garden across the sloping grassy embankment. Inside the Museum’s expansive Project Space and Balcony Gallery, visitors encounter a new sculpture by Poundstone, as well as a monumental wall print of Rainbow Rose (2013), alongside seminal inspirational works by artists that span generations and art historical movements.

Adjacent to these influential works, on loan from institutions around the country, she also includes objects from her own collection.

Curator Amy Smith-Stewart discusses the exhibition with Virginia Poundstone.

Amy Smith-Stewart: For almost ten years, you have centered your practice on the symbolism of the flower. How did this focus first come into fruition and what compelled you to concentrate your practice exclusively on it?

Virginia Poundstone: The really direct way that I got there—the rupture moment—was an aside comment made during a routine studio visit with a professor when I was a graduate student. I supported myself as a floral prop stylist and struggled to balance my work as a serious artist and maintain my income-producing career as a floral designer.

Absentmindedly, I had photographs from a photo shoot I had styled on my desk; the professor found them interesting and asked why this paid labor wasn’t part of my studio work. I didn’t have a good answer for why I was keeping them separate, as I had never even thought about these two activities relationally. As soon as I did, it began to make a lot of sense very quickly.

I was educated enough about the history of women artists to know that the floral still life was the only thing that women, as authors, were initially allowed to represent in Western art. It was the only thing that didn’t involve some sort of study of the naked human form (history painting) or allegories of death (the dominant forms of still lives at the time)— things culturally deemed inappropriate for women to be thinking about. So, their work-around was to paint life—the flowers were not wilting and the insects around the blossoms were very much alive.

Virginia Poundstone, Flower Arrangement #4, 2013 Courtesy of the artist Photography by Cathy Carver

During this time, when the tradition of Northern European still life painting was laden with death metaphors, what these women were doing was vivacious and extremely radical.

Once I made the connection between how I supported myself and this profound precedent in art history, I knew I was onto something. Since I was working in the commercial floral industry I had access to the wholesalers, and I started asking questions about their side of the trade. Quickly, I came to understand that the floral trade is a global network of insanity. None of it makes sense: flowers grown on one side of the world are sent to another side for auction and then shipped to yet another part of the globe for wholesale distribution—all for an agricultural product that has no caloric value or utility, other than to fulfill aesthetic desire and/or cultural expectations.

This desire-based market is intellectually fascinating in terms of use-value and exchangevalue. It also has a compelling and obvious correlation to the ways art is exchanged. And now, nine years later, I am still trying to figure out the many cultural and environmental effects of this intricate, multi-billion-dollar global industry.

AS: You have mentioned that your grandfather was a wildflower photographer. In fact, some of his photographs are included in The Aldrich exhibition.

How did this relationship impact your artistic direction—what does it mean to you to have these works on view, directly in relation with your own?

VP: My grandfather set a framework, but it was a long and winding path for me to get to flowers as a subject. I grew up with his images around me; I spent many formative hours playing in his archive of thousands of slides. He died when I was young, but I felt as if I had an intimate relationship with him because I saw the way he, a farm boy turned academic agricultural researcher, passionately saw nature. Much of my intellectual and visual foundation comes from the vision of his camera lens.

It means a great deal to have his works on view here— he would never have imagined that his images from rural Appalachia would end up in a museum.

AS: There is a delicate choreography of high art, craft, and design objects included in the exhibition at The Aldrich, which expressly relates to your own studio methodology. You emphasize that the genesis to create this matrix of inspirations, or to construct or define a visual narrative through line, was the Italian futurist Giacomo Balla’s Futurist Flowers, painted wood constructions made from 1918 to 1925, and reconstructed in 1968. We have three on view in the Project Space. Why is this, for you, the focal point of the exhibition?

VP: On a personal level, the Balla sculptures are to date the works that resonate the loudest and most often. Their outrageous refusal to be what they purport to be: they are just these totally abstract geometric forms that have at best a loose formal relationship to natural flowers. These were made in an edition and were manufactured in a

material. The sculptures were really ahead of their time, especially in terms of how they relate to our flat-packed disposable design culture.

AS: Standing almost eight feet tall and spanning twelve feet, comprised of stone slabs, plate glass, and aluminum, the geometric line of Quilt Square (Tulip) gracefully bends across the inner courtyard of the Museum, visible from the Atrium and the Ramp, Balcony, and Bridge galleries. This is your largest and most complex outdoor sculpture to date. What are you seeking to accomplish in this work, and how do you think it relates to the other works in the galleries?

VP: In the same way that traditional quilts were made using textile scraps, I used remnant architectural materials to build the sculpture.

This strategy of materials reassignment, combined with taking the tight grid structure of the pattern and sprawling it out rhizomatically, has, I hope, created a compelling mutation of the materials of architectural construction and the traditional craft of quilt design.

AS: Nancy Graves’s whimsical tour de force Extend-Expand (1983), a bronze sculpture with a polychrome patina, a towering web of exotic flora in a state of concerted balance, is another of the exhibition’s centerpieces. Can you discuss its importance to the exhibition and the impressions to be drawn with your own formalistic preoccupations?

Giacomo Balla (1871-1958) Futurist Flowers, 1918-1925 (reconstructed 1968) Object number: 86.222.6 Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, The Joseph H. Hirshhorn Bequest, 1981 Photography by Cathy Carver

way that took the artist’s hand out of the equation, which was, in 1911, a defiant position to take.

They sort of predicted how inorganic flowers would become, so they stuck in my mind as iconic pieces that describe what the floral industry is: manufactured commodities divorced from their wild form. A wild rose looks nothing like an industrially produced rose, they aren’t even cousins, it’s bizarre. I think of these Balla sculptures as forecasters.

Also, the outdoor sculpture, Quilt Square (Tulip), which is based on a traditional quilt square pattern, uses the same slotting technique of joining planar material to make it stand three dimensionally. It’s a sort of dumb, no-brainer efficient way of assembling flat pieces of industrially produced

VP: Graves’s sculpture is amazing—it’s bonkers!

It was made using the burn-out method, so all of the plant material was dipped in ceramic, put in a furnace, which burned away all the organic matter, and then bronze was poured inside; so it’s as close to the original plant life as metal could possibly imitate.

She then welded all the parts together and painted it. This piece and the other works she was making at this time, all have an improvisation that I relate to: one idea leads to a decision, then another decision, then some looking and thinking and more decisions.

It’s less of an execution approach to making and more like stand-up comedy.

AS: There is a stunning film by the Dutch artist Bas Jan Ader in the exhibition, Primary Time (1974). It depicts the artist arranging and rearranging flowers in a glass vase. What did you draw from your experiences in the floral industry and what do you think Ader is telling us about creative activity?

VP: The impossibility of ever being able to do it right. No, no, that’s not what I meant to say. What if I do it this way? No, that’s not right either. Never being able to say what you mean to say. Never being

able to arrange it the way you want it to be arranged.

You make one thing and that just makes you have to make another thing. Then that makes you make another thing ... and another thing … endlessly.

AS: Your objects, sculptures, and installations often incorporate materials that range from glass, bronze, metal, aluminum, stone, vinyl, ceramic tile, and wood to dried botanicals; they are pressed, folded, poured, cast or printed, appropriating techniques or formal qualities popularized by international craft traditions like Ikebana, origami, flower pressing, quilting, and lacing. Do you have training or personal experience in these traditions, or do you collaborate with practitioners? What do you hope to achieve by drawing from these distinctive handicraft traditions—are there multiple readings at play?

VP: Sometimes, I teach myself these craft techniques, and other times I hire expert craftswomen and men to make pieces to my specifications. The subtext of combining traditional fine-art sculpture materials with craft techniques most associated with unpaid domestic labor is clear, I think.

AS: Christo’s Wrapped Roses (1968) sits in a vitrine in the Alcove. A bouquet of plastic roses, it is Bas Jan Ader (1942–1975), Primary Time (video still), 1974 Patrick Painter, Inc., Bas Jan Ader Estate Liaision

swaddled in a milky see-through plastic, the red petals are clearly visible, bound with a plastic string.

It has a haunting presence, appearing almost corpse-like. Similarly to the Dutch still life paintings of bountiful bouquets, does it function like a memento mori, or is it the artificiality that gives it a more heart-breaking impact? What does its inclusion in the show symbolize for you? Is there a kinship with Christo’s sculpture and your own recent glass and cast bronze objects, made from impressions of wilting flowers, which you refer to as “fossilized”?

VP: Yes! I wish I had thought of his idea—so much less labor to produce. Much more cost effective, too.

AS: Also on view is Andy Warhol’s Flowers in Vase (1958), a hand-colored print that is another important touchstone for you (as well as his later iconic Flowers series, 1964–65). What do these works tell us about the popularity of the flower as subject matter, and its significance in the history of art (Ruysch, van Gogh, Georgia O’Keeffe, etc.)?

A similar analogy can be found in Andrew Kuo’s painting of colorful convenience store bouquets, hanging in the Project Space in direct dialogue with Christo’s Wrapped Roses. How does the mass appeal of the flower play into more conceptual

concerns when you are making the work and determining color, material, and process?

VP: Other than it being a universal object, its mass appeal and familiarity seems to be of little concern to my own work, but that popularity is precisely what I love about Warhol’s illustration, Kuo’s painting, and Christo’s composed sculpture. I am a student of their humor and matter-of-factness.

AS: A monumental vinyl print of your Rainbow Rose hovers in a corner of the Project Space, at approximately twenty feet tall and twenty-six feet wide, it features a single cut rose painted in rainbow hues that rises petrified and impervious from a white tiled pedestal. What is the symbolism behind this work and why did you decide to reproduce it on this scale? What is the implication of its looming presence on the other works in the room? Does its overt artificiality reference an industry where hundreds of thousands of flowers are mass produced, assembled, packaged, stored, and transported in near freezing temperatures, utterly divorced from the wilds of nature?

VP: Indeed. But I also think my fascination with the Rainbow Rose™ comes from my knowledge of how much time (years) and money (hundreds of thousands) it takes to get a product like this to market.

The only way something like this can exist is because there are a lot of people who want it to exist, so they can spend their money on it. Our collective desire for such artifice, or control, of our natural world is succinctly described in this product. I had to monumentalize it.

AS: Another newly commissioned work in the show is Tulips, an earthwork planted on the Museum’s grounds last November. When the tulips are in bloom, they will be visible from the large windows in the Project Space and Balcony Gallery and “frame” Quilt Square (Tulip) like a Technicolor blanket. How did you determine its design, what is the pattern it will form, and what do you think its impact will be— albeit a fleeting one? Why was it important for you to include an ephemeral work in the show? I cannot help but think of a possible reference to “tulipmania” (during the Dutch Golden Period there was a societal hysteria for the tulip that led to a boom and bust of the market) and this compulsive irrationality that compels us to produce and exhibit art!

VP: I love the connection you are making to tulipmania, the first recorded speculative economic bubble. Although I think about this legend and its warnings, and have made work with it in mind in the past, when I began to formulate the idea for the earthwork, I was thinking more

Nancy Graves (1939–1995), Extend-Expand, 1983 The Museum of Modern Art, Gift of Anne and Sid Bass, MoMA Number: 647.1983 Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY Art © Nancy Graves Foundation, Inc./Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

about the way tulips are industrially grown in tight color-block grids. Seen from the air, these appear as fantastic geometric abstractions in comparison to how wild tulips grow in sparse networked clumps throughout central Asia. The piece starts in a tight grid at the top of the hill near the Museum, and slowly fades out into sparse wild-like groupings. Cultivation is a deviation from Mother Nature, and vice versa.

AS: Which brings me to my final question: will the flower ever find a final repose for you, or will its bewitching effects on so many over so much time always find a place in your practice?

VP: My interest hasn’t waned yet and I still have many more projects on the waitlist.

Virginia Poundstone was born in 1977 in Great Lakes, Illinois, and lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Works in the Exhibition All dimensions h x w x d in inches unless otherwise noted

Rainbow Rose, 2013 Digital image printed on vinyl, adhered directly to wall 22 x 24 feet Quilt Square (Tulip), 2015 Stone, plate glass, aluminum Dimensions variable Rose Mutation, 2015 Glass, stone, ashes Dimensions Tulips, 2014–2015 3,000 Tulips Dimensions variable Courtesy of the artist Bas Jan Ader (1942–1975) Primary Time, 1974 Video, color, silent; 25:47 minutes Umatic tape transferred to DVD Patrick Painter, Inc., Bas Jan Ader Estate Liaison

Giacomo Balla (1871–1958) Futurist Flowers, 1918– 1925 (reconstructed 1968) Painted wood constructions Object numbers: 86.222.2, 86.222.4, and 86.222.6 Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, The Joseph H. Hirshhorn Bequest, 1981 Christo (Christo Javacheff) Wrapped Roses, 1968 Multiple of plastic roses, polyethylene, plastic string 2 3/8 x 23 1/2 x 5 1/4 The Museum of Modern Art. Carol and Morton H. Rapp Fund, MoMA Number: 923.2005 © 2014 Christo

Nancy Graves (1939–1995) Extend-Expand, 1983 Bronze with polychromed patina 85 x 51 x 33 5/8 The Museum of Modern Art. Gift of Anne and Sid Bass, MoMA Number: 647.1983 ©2014 Nancy Graves Andrew Kuo Flowers (Triple), 2013 Acrylic on linen 51 x 38 Courtesy of the artist and Marlborough Chelsea Bruce Poundstone Selections from his Archive of Wildflower Photography, 1955– 1980 Slides in slide sheets, LED light box Collection of Virginia Poundstone

Andy Warhol (1928–1987) Flowers in Vase, 1958 Hand colored print 29 1/2 x 23 1/2 Courtesy The Brant Foundation, Greenwich, CT Belgian Lace Found piece, unknown maker, no date 8 1/4 x 5 1/2 Collection of Virginia Poundstone German Art Nouveau, ca. 1910–20 3 Glazed ceramic tiles Manufacturer: NSTG, Bremen, Germany Collection of James Baker

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum Founded by Larry Aldrich in 1964, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum is dedicated to fostering the work of innovative artists whose ideas and interpretations of the world around us serve as a platform to encourage creative thinking. It is the only museum in Connecticut devoted to contemporary art, and throughout its fifty-year history, has engaged its community through thought provoking interdisciplinary programs.

Board of Trustees Eric G. Diefenbach, Chairman; Linda M. Dugan, Vice-Chairman; William Burback, Treasurer/ Secretary; Diana Bowes; Chris Doyle; Annabelle K. Garrett; Georganne Aldrich Heller, Honorary Trustee; Michael Joo; Neil Marcus; Kathleen O’Grady; Lori L. Ordover; Martin Sosnoff, Trustee Emeritus; John Tremaine Alyson Baker, Executive Director

Virginia Poundstone Flower Mutations Curated by Amy Smith-Stewart May 3 to October 25, 2015 The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, in addition to significant support from its Board of Trustees, receives contributions from many dedicated friends and patrons. Major funding for Museum programs and operations has been provided by the Department of Economic and Community Development, Connecticut Office of the Arts; the Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Foundation; The Leir Chairitable Foundations; the Goldstone Family Foundation; and the Anne S. Richardson Fund.

Generous support for Virginia Poundstone: Flower Mutations has been provided by The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Inc. Thanks to COLORBLENDS™ Wholesale Flower Bulbs for their donation of flower bulbs.

Larry Aldrich (1906–2001), Founder Additional support for exhibitions has been provided by the SAHA Association and The Coby Foundation.

Cover Virginia Poundstone, Rainbow Rose, 2013 Courtesy of the artist

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