In the group show “The Seeds We Plant Today,” presented at Martha’s, flowers constitute a metonym several times over—of affection, of community, of gardens, of the environment at large—offering the idea that “the seeds we plant today will bring about the future we want tomorrow.”
A flower takes time to grow, and so the planter needs to have patience: we plant flowers in the winter so they may grow in the spring and summer. It is a cycle of life of which we happily take part, the colorful blooms rewarding our efforts—and our waiting. We then tend to these rewards, pluck them to gift to loved ones, adding brightness to their days.
The works in “The Seeds We Plant Today,” which span painting, sculpture, drawing, and photography, take us through this cycle of life. Payton McGowen and Sarah Stellman present us with the idea of flowers in McGowen’s abstracted compositions of large fields of color and Stellman’s subtle suggestions of familiarity.
Rowan Howe places us in a flower’s natural habitat—outside—with the creeping sense of danger this entails, while Weylin Neyra places his flowers in vases in a depiction of the outdoors in unnatural colors, the boundary of the vessel accompanied by a boundary in the recognizable.
Jorge Villareal and Jeffrey From then take us into interiors, with naturalistic depictions: Villareal’s pastel images of filled sinks, dotted with flowers, evoke images of a domesticity outside of time, while From’s meticulously created ballpoint images pay homage to a long art-historical tradition of still lifes.
Frank Zhu and Opal Mae Ong then bring the flower to us, Zhu through a sculptural inclusion in the space of the viewer, Ong through a depiction of an intimate interaction between human and flower.
Brach Tiller then takes us into a not-so-distant future, at once pre-, mid-, and post-apocalyptic, the flower amongst melting ice caps, a bottle that reads I love you first erect, held up by snow, then floating, accompanied by the danger of thorns, revealed when the ice becomes water.
In 1993, Octavia Butler wrote Parable of the Sower, a speculative fiction novel about a community called “Earthseed” who resides in a post-apocalyptic, climate-change-riddled Earth, aiming to fulfill their destiny—“to take root among the stars.” In the novel, Butler writes,
“Create no images of God. Accept the images that God has provided. They are everywhere, in everything. God is Change— Seed to tree, tree to forest; Rain to river, river to sea; Grubs to bees, bees to swarm. From one, many; from many, one; Forever uniting, growing, dissolving— forever Changing. The universe is God’s self-portrait.”
In Butler’s parable, the seed is the key, containing everything within it that it needs to grow, to form life, to become something altogether new and different to itself—a difference, however, with the fragrance of kinship: the “Other,” it says, is always within you.
From one, many; from many, one.
From many—me and you, us and the flower, the flower and everything it stands for—
One.
Text by Grace Sparapani
