RIDGEFIELD, CONN.- Artist Virginia Poundstone—whose practice spans photography, sculpture, video, and installation, and is exclusively focused on the history and botany of the flower and its socio-economic and cultural significance—mounted an exhibition featuring a number of new works, including an outdoor sculpture surrounded by an earthwork comprising over 3,000 tulips, at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum this spring.

The exhibition, which will remain on view through October 25, 2015, as part of the Circumstance series at The Aldrich, is dedicated to two important sources of inspiration: Giacomo Balla’s series of Futurist Flowers and traditional American flower-pattern quilts.

Poundstone also debuts a new outdoor sculpture, Quilt Square (Tulip) (2015), which sits alongside the earthwork Tulips (2014–15), planted on the Museum’s grounds last fall with the assistance of the community, as well as an interior room filled with artworks and objects that investigate the visual representation of flowers through abstraction in art and design.

The sculpture, a geometric flower in stone and glass, is based on the geometry of a traditional quilt pattern. Placed in the interior courtyard where it is visible from within the Museum’s atrium, it is being seen for a fleeting period with the backdrop of tulips in eight dynamic hues, forming a resplendent garden across the sloping grassy embankment.

Inside the Museum, visitors encounter Rose Mutation (2015), a new sculpture by Poundstone comprised of glass, stone and ashes that sits atop a white tiled pedestal, as well as a monumental wall print of Rainbow Rose (2013). These are complemented by seminal inspirational works that span generations and art historical movements, on loan from institutions across the country, by artists such as Balla (Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution), Christo (The Museum of Modern Art), Nancy Graves (The Museum of Modern Art), Andrew Kuo (Marlborough Chelsea), and Andy Warhol (The Brant Foundation Art Study Center). In addition, Poundstone includes objects from her own collection, including one thousand slides of wildflower photographs taken by her grandfather, Bruce Poundstone, a piece of Belgian lace, and German Art Nouveau ceramic tiles, (ca. 1910–1920).

Curator Amy Smith-Stewart states: “For almost ten years, Poundstone has centered her practice on the symbolism of the flower. She uses the overt artificiality of Rainbow Rose to reference the floral industry, where hundreds of thousands of flowers are mass produced, assembled, packaged, stored, and transported in near freezing temperatures, utterly divorced from the wilds of nature.”

Poundstone adds: “I also think my fascination with the Rainbow Rose™ comes from my knowledge of how much time (years) and money (hundreds of thousands) it takes to get a product like this to market. The only way something like this can exist is because there are a lot of people who want it to exist, so they can spend their money on it. Our collective desire for such artifice, or control, of our natural world is succinctly described in this product. I had to monumentalize it.”

Virginia Poundstone: Flower Mutations has been organized by Aldrich curator Amy Smith-Stewart.