Flowers for donald is a series of digital photo-montage works I began in the days following the U.S. Election. They borrow the symbolic potency of flowers to act as anchor points of protest, memorial, and self-reflexive connotations of enduring beauty within the traditions of art history.
These pictures are proposed as a platform of Dada revivalism to question the function of art in our new era. Through the appropriation of contemporary visual signatures of news and social media, the incorporation of photographs of Donald Trump supporters, and an overall aesthetic of blatant artifice, these montages reflect current day media conditions and point towards issues of destabilization in our common information platforms.
These pictures also attempt to enact a theoretical framework exploring two commonly held truisms of the role of art: to portray beauty (using flowers as a common symbol of beauty), and to hold a mirror up to our modern world. These works exist in an intersection where these two truisms collide in paradox, insofar that these two goals cannot occupy the same aesthetic space within our current political environment.
Gregory Eddi Jones
