Lilies of the field

About

Mapping connections between historical archives, contemporary photography, and performance, Dor Guez’s exhibition Lilies of the Field mines the rich historical and mythological dimensions of Jerusalem as a site of religious and political projection. Guez’s photographic series Lilies of the Field is comprised of luminous, mysterious prints of pressed floral

and plant arrangements that the artist discovered in his research of the American Colony archives. Formed in the aftermath of the Great Chicago Fire in 1871, the American Colony was a mission of Christian Americans who left Chicago for Jerusalem in 1881, where they became active in charitable work to help the local community, establishing orphanages, soup kitchens, and medical resources for locals who suffered before and during the World Wars. The American Colony’s work was not conceived to benefit any one religion, promoting interfaith dialog to such an extent that their communal residence is now known as the American Colony Hotel, where the peace talks that led to the Oslo Peace Accord were held.

The flowers that Guez’s project highlights represent a diversity of flora indigenous to the holy land, and the areas surrounding the Old City. As popular souvenirs for tourists and missionaries making religious pilgrimages, the pressed flowers in themselves document different forms of devotional labor, from the work of the artisans who pressed the flowers, to those who made the journey and acquired the flower arrangements as souvenirs.

Selected by Guez from the American Colony archive, these plant-based objects are embedded with contradictions implied by a discrete piece of nature – the flower – preserved in resin, frozen like taxidermized game captured by a hunter. Equally contradictory is his use of color which belies the natural conditions of the landscape from which the plants emerged. Guez’s process involves tracing the remnants of this yellow pigment, and photographing the front side of each flora arrangement, and then of the other side of its overlaying sheet, which, over the course of a century, had absorbed most of carotenoid pigment. By aligning the two images – that of the flowers, with that of the pigmented protective layer – he re- conceptualizes the images to reflect the time that has passed since they were made.

This process produced two photographic series, both photographic negatives. Describing the method of production, Guez writes, “The first, based on the flowers themselves, simulates a photogram of the flowers on a scale of 1:1, while the second, by converting the yellow to its complementary shade on the color spectrum, simulates large- scale cyanotypes. In the latter, blank areas indicate the anthocyanin- pigmented flowers of the original arrangement, which appear to fade under the residue of yellow pigment. With attention given predominantly to the pigment shed by the flowers rather than to the flowers themselves, I undermine the hierarchy between what is perceived as authentic, as opposed to fabricated.”

Building on his work with the flowers, Guez has recently staged several performative lectures within the archive of the American Colony where he presented his research findings, drawing on the histories of Zionism, the Armenian quarter in Jerusalem, the American Colony itself, and Guez’s Christian Palestinian Archive. Initiated in 2006 when Guez found a suitcase full of family photographs under his grandparents’ bed, the Christian Palestinian Archive is a platform he established to document a minority within a minority, the Christian-Palestinian diaspora, collecting thousands of images submitted by professional and amateur photographers, material that is both historical and aesthetic, intended for use and circulation well beyond