To View a Plastic Flower Opening Reception on February 9, 2020

About

The group exhibition features new video and multimedia installations by 3 artists: Abigail Raphael Collins, T. Kim-Trang Tran, and Samira Yamin that engage themes of interdependence, positionality, and the poetics (as well as politics) of conflict.
 
Central to the exhibition’s title and themes, To View a Plastic Flower is a Buddhist monk and antiwar activist Thích Nhất Hạnh’s idea of “inter-being,” meaning nothing can exist by itself, instead, everything has to “inter-be.” The figure of the flower stems from one of Thích’s well-known sayings, which suggests that by touching a flower one also touches the clouds and rain that were necessary to manifest the flower. Viewed through the lens of a plastic flower, the works in the exhibition provide a multi-dimensional interrogation of the construction, representation, and limitations of knowledge through media as a means to understand our socio- and geopolitical times. To View a Plastic Flower presents 3 discrete installations that register the presence and absence of information, movement, and optics through each artist’s point of view set within the theater of military engagement. Abigail Raphael Collins’ experimental documentary and video installation, Out of Play, the sculptural work in Samira Yamin’s Passing Obliquely From One Medium Into Another (examining war photography) and T. Kim-Trang Tran’s three-channel video installation projected on hand-embroidered screens, exploring seemingly disparate events of the early 1970s.

 For more information, visit:  https://www.lamag.org/visit/ Generous support for this exhibition is provided by the Barnsdall Art Park Foundation.