New City Arts presents “Flower, Til Death Do We Part,” prints and painting by Charlottesville artist Hannah Barefoot.
New City Arts' Welcome Gallery
114 3rd St. NE, Charlottesville, VA 22902
First Fridays
May 6, 5:00–7:30 PM
Free and open to the public. All ages welcome.
Gallery Hours
12:00–4:00 PM, Monday–Friday
Exhibition Statement (provided by the artist)
This work is part of my final thesis project on how recuperating the associative significance flowers can imbue a sense of responsibility in landscape and ecological processes. Several contemporary understandings of ecological systems at a very broad scale suggest we’re in a new geologic epoch where humans are, in the most intrinsic and indirect way, gardeners on a microscopic and global scale. Biotic pollination networks depend on flowers for forage and are extremely compromised by increasingly “flowerless landscapes.” I wonder if we are simultaneously compromising our connection to landscape through the lack of investment in flowers and their presence in the public realm? Herbaceous perennial flowers remain within the landscape throughout the year, though not always visible. Gardeners of perennials witness a yearly vegetal growth and decline pattern, the presence of mortality within the landscape becomes amplified. By introducing flowers into the sterile, mute habitat of lawns, with the intention of managing for vivid and visible mortality, cycles are illuminated.
About the Artist (provided by the artist)
Hannah Barefoot is a Masters of Landscape Architecture student at UVA and artist in Charlottesville. Her work has focused on material construction, craft and the study of landscape. She will graduate in May 2016 and plans to move to North Carolina to work at a landscape architecture in Durham and pick up blacksmithing, papermaking, and gardening again.
Image courtesy of the artist.