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- Precise Forms, Portia Munson and Stephen Eichorn · 2011
Precise Forms
About the Artists:
Portia Munson creates large-scale photographic prints using fresh flowers grown in her gardens as the medium. Every constellation is unique to a moment in time, preserving what is in bloom on that day. The flowers are arranged directly on a scanner, capturing detailed configurations in high resolution. The images are then printed on rag paper with archival inks. Munson experiments with the color and structure of flowers, slicing into buds, pulling blossoms apart and layering them onto one another. The orbiting combinations are like imagined aerial plans of gardens laid out in flowers and petals. Munson’s optically intense arrangements of flowers conjure the ephemeral nature of the botanical along with its innate utopian beauty.
Chicago-based artist Stephen Eichhorn creates delicate hand cut paper collages from reproductions of foliage — palm fronds, grasses, leaves and flowers. Portions of the work exist in a cosmic space. While the images are of pieces of the natural world, they are composed in an entirely fictitious black or white void. The intense layering of finely cut florals are architecturally structured into ritualistic wreaths or floral arrangements, yet surprisingly they embrace a simple elegance from their origins.