A flower expected everywhere […]

(Emily Dickinson)
Juliet Karelsen & Jocelyn Lee
Fineberg Family Community Room
June 30 2022 – August 26 2022

Through the symbolism of flowers, Karelsen and Lee explore issues of fragility, strength, transformation, beauty, vulnerability, life and death. As Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh wrote “We can describe the flower as full of everything. There is nothing that is not present in the flower.” Working respectively in photography and sculpture/fiber, these two artists (whose friendship spans 35 years) respond in very different ways to the brilliance of their subjects. The exquisitely rich and earthy tones of Lee’s photographs capture with poetry and depth the memento mori of flowers and organic elements as they flourish and decay, reminding us of the ephemerality of life and the inevitability of death. In contrast, Karelsen’s color-saturated, effusive bouquets burst forth from their frames—the constructed flowers arrested in moments of perfect bloom—while her cyanotype prints preserve the tactile signatures of flowers who gave their lives for art. The exhibit, with its wide-ranging palette and shifting scales and textures, invites the viewer into an enchanted garden through a variety of apertures, into a phantasmagorical through-the- looking-glass world of terrestrial and celestial regeneration and decomposition.

“We see sunshine, we see rain, we see clouds, we see the earth and we also see time and space in the flowers.” (Thich Nhat Hahn)

Ever wonder what happens when an exhibition ends?

Check out this take-down video of Juliet Karelsen and Jocelyn Lee’s “A Flower Expected Everywhere!”

Wrap Up

Bye Bye