Flower are like stars to artist Karen Hochman Brown in her lush and literally blossoming installation Vexilla Florum, first shown at LAAA’s Gallery 825 in the early fall of 2019, and then in a smaller grouping through early March 2020 at TAG Gallery.
With this installation, Hochman Brown delves deeper into her signature kaleidoscopic floral mandala work in a dazzling tour de force of eye-popping images.
Based in photography and digitally manipulated, the artist’s riveting work sometimes reminds the viewer of a kind of dimensional, exotic stained-glass. She distorts and reflects her single-subject photographic images to highlight both color, shapes, and patterns, and has described her work as “rooted in nature and geometry.” Much like stained glass, the images also have an inward glow, an almost visible translucence.
If a flower serves as the “seed” of her work, it’s fruition is something richer and more compelling. She uses mixed media and multi-media to combine several different processes, all rooted in the fantastic, even magical, evocation of floral blooms. Using handcrafted and digital photo-manipulation, she pulls the viewer into a world that is both alchemic and amazing. Here, her digital practice is paired with precise and rather glorious laser-cut patterns.
The images begin with a photograph of a single-subject flower, chosen from one of many around the world. Distorted and reimaged in a kind of new realism, each piece becomes a precious jewel of nature transformed by specialized software.
This exhibition also involves intricate laser cut headpieces. To create them, she used a Glowforge laser printer to make the wood cuts that top each of her suspended works: six at LAAA, two at TAG. Banners are hand-sewing and assembled, in a fascinating mix of traditional textile techniques and the hyper-modern computer software-based world.
Mounted on slanted poles, each floral banner appears suspended in space. A shadow image spills behind each piece. The elaborate and graceful laser-cut “crown” from which the banner is hung features perfect leaves spreading out from and surrounding a central laser-cut version of the floral image centered on the banner itself.
The complex interwoven patterns of each banner’s background reflect the central image itself as well, and the color behind this pattern reflects that of the main floral element imprinted upon it.
Centered in the lower third of each mounted banner, the primary image is a full, mesmerizingly bisected kaleidoscopic flower. It is both a star, a snowflake, and an extraordinary blossom, or all three.
At LAAA, Hochman Brown’s banners, with backgrounds ranging from pink to brown to green to purple, were mounted in sets of three on either side of the galley, as if hung in a royal hall leading up to the ultimate throne. Here, replacing such a throne is a video installation in which realistic, intensely close images of actual flowers pop up, recede, and form a stunning, lush visual bouquet before dancing off again. These photographic images in turn evolve into stylized, star and snow flake-like digital blooms that spin and dance in a hypnotic and wonderful motion.
It is an immersive and deeply meditative experience that pulls the eye into the universe within a flower. One of the great skills in Hochman Brown’s work is that she introduces the viewer to the concept of the eternal and infinite contained in small but potent package.
Her use of photography as a medium heightens both the realism and the fantasy inherent in all her work; and she combines graphic art with her photo images in precise and revealing focus.
In short, she takes natural beauty and shapes of it an entire soothing and magnificent world.
Both at LAAA, and in a smaller grouping of two banners accompanying her digital animation at TAG Gallery, Vexilla Florum is like no other installation or exhibition. The viewer finds a rose is a rose that’s an entirely different and compelling hybrid in Hochman Brown’s hands.
Watch for future exhibitions of this installation.
- Genie Davis; photos provided by the artist