Flowers for Donald is a series of digital photo collages begun in the days following the U.S. election. The symbolic potency of flowers acts as anchor points of protest, memorial, and self-reflexive connotations of enduring beauty within the traditions of art history.
Through the adoption of floral motifs, the work also enters into a long and cherished art historical tradition, and uses this position as a point of departure to question the role of art in politically turbulent times. I'm calling back to Dadaist strategies of Hannah Hock, John Heartfield, and others who utilized collage as political and social critique.
Flowers for Donald engages with two commonly held truisms of the role of art: to perform beauty, and to hold a mirror to the modern world. These resulting pictures see these two truisms collide in paradox.