Sharon Core – Flowering

Yancey Richardson presents Flowering, an exhibition of new and recent photographs by Sharon Core examining the expressive qualities of plants and perennials. About Yancey Richardson is pleased to announce Flowering, an exhibition of new and recent photographs by Sharon Core that continue to examine the expressive qualities of plants and perennials, both as types and as singular forms. Originating as a kind of personal archive, these photographs document many of the varieties she cultivated in her garden by describing them at different stages in their life-cycle, from a first flowering to their dried and nearly withered end. Though most would eventually return the following season, others would die out, resulting in a growing portfolio of images that serve equally as studies and memorials. In these sharp and pristine images, Core combines the immediacy of observation from her day-to-day life with a deeper historical perspective. Each of the subjects in Flowering are the result of years of research and cultivation by Core of different flower varieties, considering everything from their historical lineage, shape, color or size. The project originated from a prior body of work, 1606-1907, itself a restaging of three-hundred years of floral painting in Western art, from the Dutch Golden Age through modernism. Many of the varieties that Core selected, planted and photographed are rare and boast lineages going back centuries, with titles that invoke obscure figures and seldom-explored moments in history. The manner in which Core photographs each flower or plant both engages with her own historical predecessors, from Charles Jones to Edward Steichen, while also signalling an aesthetic and conceptual break from their example. Through an approach both elemental and descriptive, Core allows each botanical subject to reveal itself against a stark white background, allowing its silhouette to determine the structure of the composition. In a departure from her typical working methods, these photographs are made digitally and with a kind of clinical, quasi-scientific edge that suggests they are being seen as if in a laboratory. What closer inspection reveals is the many details and traces of natural, circumstantial life that define the life of a tulip, dahlia, poppy or magnolia: chance folds of a petal and beads of water suspended for all time, insects still present for purposes entirely their own. Though highly controlled, Core's images are also fundamentally artful, from her original decision to photograph a specific moment in the life of her garden, to the stark white background, close cropping, reverse perspectives and saturated hues. All contribute to photographs that go well beyond expressing the platonic ideal of a given flower or plant, aiming instead to distill one part of their larger, multifaceted essence. Read more Toggle Photography