Emily Counts, Laurel Hill, Hilary Horvath, Emma Lou-Weber, and Erica Prince | The Way of Flowers
Dust to Dust Projects
March 16, 2018, through April 29, 2018
Opening reception, Friday, March 16, 2018, from 6—8 PM
Design Week Portland Open House + Olfactory Workshop, Thursday, April 19, 4—7 PM
Dust to Dust Projects hours: Thursday—Monday: 12—8 PM & Tuesday—Wednesday by appointment only
EXHIBITION INFORMATION
Dust to Dust presents The Way of Flowers, an exhibition that highlights the ephemeral and sensory qualities of flowers through sculptural vessels, adornment, painting, floral arrangement, and olfactory experiences.
Featuring work by Emily Counts, Laurel Hill, Hilary Horvath, Erica Prince, Anya Roberts-Toney, and Emma Lou Weber, the exhibition is a celebration of our far-reaching and multi-faceted relationship with flowers. Their subtle and studied arrangement has been used for millennia to create a link between indoor and outdoor spaces. Ephemeral and vibrant, they remind us of the impermanence of all things while also invoking desire and vitality. Flowers have a cultural language that in many ways has been lost. The banal cellophane wrapped bouquet has become a default sign of affection that lacks the nuanced meaning purported to be universal in early nineteenth-century literature. The only half-remembered, symbolic meaning of flowers removes a component of culture that could, and at one point did, create rich textures of emotion and sentiment.
Hilary Horvath is a floral designer who draws inspiration from the landscape and offerings of the Pacific Northwest. Her flowers range from wild, natural arrangements to opulent bouquets. For The Way of Flowers, Horvath will create individual arrangements for the ceramic vessels featured in the exhibition.
Emily Counts is a Seattle-based artist who often explores contemporary themes of connectivity and fluidity in biology, technology, and sexuality. Holes, perforations, and hand rendered patterns converge on fleshy stoneware vessels made specifically for The Way of Flowers.
Erica Prince's extruded and hand-built ceramic Containers are sculptures with interactive and utilitarian properties. They bring awareness to acts of choosing, placing, arranging and compartmentalizing. The forms are inspired by 17th Century Dutch tulip vases and retro-futurist architecture, utilizing a limited sculptural vocabulary to yield unexpected biomorphic geometries.
Laurel Hill begins by looking. Drawing forms from personal, mundane, and transformative experiences, she translates these found shapes from a pristine mental image, through her hands, into an object that, for Hill, embody a lost artifact. Hill thinks of her vessels and jewelry as Alien-Greek relics.
Anya Roberts-Toney continues her interest in fashion and femininity in a new body of work that combines depictions of flowers, pulled from the 19th century still life paintings, with formal disruptions, complicating their easy consumability.
Emma Lou Weber is an illustrator, artist, and floral designer who often works with Hilary Horvath. For Weber, flowers connect her to the natural world, the paintings she created for this exhibition speak to this connection, conjuring associations between the body, the subconscious, and nature.
“can you speak to me in flowers.
It will be easier for me to understand.”
— Nayyirah Waheed