Downtown, Los Angeles
Austyn Weiner
Here's Your Fucking Flower
IbidIbid Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Los Angeles based artist Austyn Weiner. Here’s Your Fucking Flower marks the beginning of a new series of paintings informed by interpersonal relationships, emotional transactions, and sense of place. In her recent paintings and drawings, made with oil stick and wax pastel, Weiner addresses the representation of flowers and their weight as emotional exchange. Stamin, pistil, and pedal are more than stand-ins for eroticized body parts – reading beyond the sexualization often assigned to her prior work, the representation of flowers as a token of exchanged emotion is wide ranging from romance and affinity to remorse and mourning. There are anticipatory flowers, angry flowers, sad flowers, congratulatory flowers, grieving flowers, and grateful flowers. They are unmonumental monuments filled with specific intention at their moment of exchange, only to dry out and die. For Here’s Your Fucking Flower, Weiner was most concerned with resentful flowers. As a result, the canvases are claustrophobically filled with forms struggling to fit into the spaces around them. These glyphic flower forms engage in a struggle and dance to find their place. Much as a photographer records the feelings of her time, the flowers in Weiner’s canvases each record a feeling or emotion filtered through her hand. In taking on flowers and landscapes, a loaded art historical subject, Weiner filters all references through her own lived experience. Initially trained in photography, she carries a filmic approach to image, often relying of motifs and repetition to build a nuanced variation of meaning making. The paintings are read cinematically while emotional plotlines carry more weight than vehicles for storytelling. Buried in this narrative is Weiner’s deeply felt sense of place. Drawing on her time spent in the south of France and Los Angeles, her images of flowers are directly influenced by the striking similarities between the two locales. Despite drastically differing histories, cultures, and ways of living, there is an affinity across the two Mediterranean climates for dry shrubs and vivid flowers after a rainy season. Regardless of location, her paintings reflect a longing for a mountainside full of wildflowers or a single daisy growing on the side of the highway. Austyn Weiner was born 1989 in Miami, Florida. She studied photography and painting at the University of Michigan School of Art and Design and Parsons School of Photography. Recent projects include the solo exhibition Wilhardt & Naud at The Lodge, Los Angeles, and organizing We The People, a group exhibition benefiting the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence (NCADV) at Werkärtz, Los Angeles.