Superbloom

and

Cut Flowers

Hand-cut archival inkjet prints, cellophane bags,

postcards in rotating rack

2020

Superbloom and Cut Flowers were born out of my research on the relationship between historical landscape ideology, changing technology, and today’s desire for a superlative view perpetuated by social media influencers. In the 21st century, for people who have turned tourism into a career through monetized social media posts, they seek out singular phenomena brought on by extreme weather events such as Super Blooms that follow long periods of drought, whose visual spectacle brings destructive volumes of visitors to small towns in California. This work re-creates this life-cycle of entitlement and consumption through the hand-removal of the individual flowers from each of the four panels in the disjunctive panorama of a major bloom event in 2019. The cut flowers are packaged in cellophane and photographed in shopping baskets and the prints are sold as postcards on a rotating rack. The postcards are garish, heavily manipulated images of the packaged cut paper flowers that ask viewers to examine their desire for a souvenir. They represent our predilection for ownership of land, a prescriptive function of the ubiquity of landscape photographs that recall Susan Sontag’s declaration, “The most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads—as an anthology of images. To collect photographs is to collect the world.”