Capturing Ephemera | The Art of Floral Photography

Capturing Ephemera | The Art of Floral Photography
October 5 - 28, 2023
3045 Granville Street, Vancouver


Bau-Xi Vancouver presents Capturing Ephemera, a curated exhibition featuring three photographic artists – Barbara Cole, Isabelle Menin and Martin Klimas - who have pushed the boundaries of floral imagery to exciting and innovative territory with their creativity and specialized technical precision. The medium of photography lends itself perfectly to floral imagery – its immediacy allows the artist to capture and immortalize any desired moment within a flower’s short and fragile lifespan.

Toronto based artist Barbara Cole, well known for her underwater images, thoughtfully selects various types of flowers with particular features and characteristics and submerges them in water, the moving current or sub-surface reflections giving them an otherworldly look and personality.

Belgian artist Isabelle Menin photographs multiple blooms individually and then proceeds to digitally separate them, sometimes down to the individual petal; she then arranges them in unexpected compositions often on a soft Rococo-like background, yielding a lush and sophisticated final image that encourages the viewer to enter further into the artist’s visionary dreamscape.

Finally, German photographer Martin Klimas uses an extremely high-speed camera and lens to photograph carefully selected flowers and branches in the exact instant that their ceramic vases are hit by a bullet. The perfect stillness of the blooms above juxtaposed by the tumultuous shatter below depicts both an actual and symbolic moment of change: chaos and calm co-existing in a sliver of time.

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