smell the roses
Presley L.
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How can we be productive? What's your Five-Year Plan? What happens next?
Our culture constantly asks us these questions about what our future holds. Our heads are bound forward in the constant pursuit of the next thing, or our eyes refrain fixated on our phones and the rest of the world fades away. Yet, what the world often fails to encourage is for us to look up and around. In this art piece, I wish to convey that even though beauty exists all around us, we -- more often than not -- fail to notice. As the saying goes, ""stop and smell the roses"" but, in a society that values achieving career-oriented or monetary goals, these flowers we ought to appreciate - symbolic of the present - are behind glass. If we wanted to, we could view them yet, with our mindsets obsessed with the future, we fail to truly appreciate or sometimes even notice the beauty of the current moment.
The people in this photo I captured while at the airport -- a place where we think only of the destination ahead. I masked and layered my photographs of flowers from my local neighborhood and chose to accentuate their bright colors to contrast with the black and white of the airport. Another, more subtle touch I added was using overlays of paintings over the floral arrangement to highlight that while beauty and art exist in the present, we still obsess over the future.
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Creative expression allows us to depict our real lives and escape into dreamscapes of our own where the limits of money, power, and social norms fail to contain us. Art blurs the lines between fiction and illusion while enabling the audience to ponder their own perception of the world.
