FRAGMENTS
In this series I fragment, draw and stitch together images of a dutch flower paintings by Jan Van Huysum titled Still Life with Flowers and Fruit. I explore my urge to evade endings through making, and question the ways a copy both succeeds and fails to preserve the original. I add my own spin on the limitless iterations of the painting made possible by its digital copy. Once digitized, the work’s unique place in the world is exchanged for a reflection, an echo permeating and replicating indefinitely. In the cloud, it exists in infinite places simultaneously, yet the pixels on a screen don’t prolong the physical life of the painting any more than painting does for the individual flowers’ it represents. What endures is the artists’ view of the flower, warped and dragged into existence by their own hand. Hundreds of years since his own death, his painting remains, and its digital likeness will endure beyond that. A fraction of a reflection of a translation of his life, his perspective, remains.
Considering the implications of the french word for still life - nature morte - which translates directly to “dead nature” I use drawing as a form of active viewing.
I connect with the image, exploring the worlds which exist within. I filter the image through myself, distancing and distorting the original to make it my own; to keep alive some part of my experience, separate from my physical self. I call attention to the carefully inserted details and symbols littered throughout the paintings. By zooming in, cropping and sapping the images of color I reveal the human presence and the numerous indicators of death, cycles of life and the passage of time contained within the bountiful energy of the original composition.
I sew my fragmented pieces together, recalling the act of Frankenstein stitching flesh from separate bodies to make his monster. Similar to the way Van Huysum painted flowers in the same vase regardless of the impossibility of their coexistence in reality. An element of the grotesque residing within the beautiful, his imaginary bouquets are an exhumation and resurrection. His work exemplifies art’s resistance to the limits of reality and the confines of impermanence, reflecting my own desires to evade endings. I cling to the present through the act of making, an ultimately fruitless attempt to contain the ravages of time.