Spring in Atlanta is a rapturous affair. There's a sweetness mixed with the heady properties of new growth. One can smell the earth reawakening as color enters the landscape. Jackson Fine Art presents two photographers whose work explores nature in a full bloom of color with earthy, pungent sensibilities. In Eat Flowers and Persephone, respectively, Cig Harvey and Angela West show themselves as artists whose photography expresses their embrace of nature. Both are on view through May 15.
It's dangerous for women artists to make work that's all about flowers and picturesque landscapes in full bloom with the sweetness and heaviness of nature. Photos of flowers can so easily be written off as the domain of the feminine, ornamental and decorative and, therefore, excluded from any serious dialogue. Floral subject matter and bucolic landscape in both painting and photography have been snubbed and delegated as second-tier genres. Women artists from Georgia O'Keeffe to Judy Chicago have depicted flowers in their work; their art has been partitioned off and delegated to a separate conversation in the art world. Every woman artist who makes work about beauty has been relegated to this platform.
