The Flower Trip

It's always a good time for a trip through a flower field. In the book 'Flowers', artist Lucas Samaras doesn't disappoint. This wonderful collection of images is a journey through perception, and a very interesting one.

Samaras presents photographs of flowers that have been altered. Distorted, intensified in color and shape, fragmented, and ultimately reinvented through digital process into something hallucinatory. It's a technique he came to in his career already defined by self-representation and the transformation of ordinary objects into something stranger. Here in this book, the flower becomes the muse of his lens. The process itself acts as a metaphor for perception.

Normally these kinds of creative journeys make very clear statements or address direct subject matter through an interpretation. This one asks you to use direct subjects as the avenue to find yourself in the interpretive state... to see yourself as the statement instead, and the result becomes entirely interpretive. The symbolic use of flowers as the vehicle is what makes it so beautiful. You, the viewer, get to witness yourself bloom. Much like an actual psychedelic experience, where reality is experiencing itself.

The book is careful to separate the image from anything it might be compared to. The photographs only appear on the right side when you open it. The left side of every spread is left blank. I'm fond of this kind of intentional white space as an abstract artist myself. It functions as its own language, and it gives you complete liberty within it.

I struggle to say too much about this book, because as an art piece it is so highly personal in its interpretation. What I can say is that the design and the choices throughout are luminous, haunting, enchanting, and ultimately transporting. You find something new and intriguing every time you wander through it.
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Well worth the trip.

Originally posted HERE.