The works in Applause, Cécile Brünner, Double Delight, Iceberg, Juliet, Knock Out are constructed through methods of assemblage and collage, languages aligned with reuse and rearrangement. These material strategies mirror the way symbols circulate, how meaning can accrue through new associations or shift within existing ones. In this exhibition, these ideas are considered through the cultural resonance of the rose—as fraught, ubiquitous. It is this accumulating field of associations that becomes material.

Thinking about roses becomes thinking about other people thinking about roses:

Rainer Maria Rilke’s poems and the mythologizing of his death; Cy Twombly’s paintings of roses with lines from Rilke; the suffocating excess of petals in Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s The Roses of Heliogabalus; Shakespeare’s line, “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet”; Gertrude Stein’s, “a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose”; George Orwell’s rose garden; Rebecca Solnit’s book about Orwell’s rose garden; the last rosebush in what used to be my grandmother’s rose garden; rose-coloured glasses; stop and smell the roses; White Rose Gasoline; the rose on a teacup, with Red Rose Tea; Applause, the world’s first genetically modified “blue” rose; Juliet, cultivated over fifteen years at near 5 million dollars; and finally, Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, where the rose is so overly signified, it means nothing at all.

Across these references, the rose accumulates various, sometimes contradictory meanings. A saturating familiarity that often obscures the labour and ecological costs embedded in its cultivation and circulation.

Thank you to the Ontario Arts Council and the Government of Ontario for their support.