EARTH LAUGHS IN FLOWERS

Cruz Ortiz, Alissa Alfonso, Daniela Gomez Paz, Winnie Sidharta, Pearl Cowan, Alexander Deschamps, Birgitte Støvring

November 2 - December 14, 2023

Alanna Miller is pleased to present Earth Laughs in Flowers, a group exhibition featuring the work of artists Cruz Ortiz, Pearl Cowan, Alissa Alfonso, Winnie Sidharta, Daniela Gomez Paz, Alexander Deschamps, and Birgitte Støvring. The opening reception will take place at Alanna Miller on Thursday, November 2nd from 6-8 pm.

Earth Laughs in Flowers is quoted from the poem Hamatreya by Ralph Waldo Emerson, a famous Transcendentalist who was writing in opposition to the Industrial Revolution in the early-mid 19th century and its dissolution of the soul ties between nature and man. In the poem, flowers embody the earth's laughter in response to human beings’ arrogance in the futile pursuit of domination over the planet. 

This exhibition brings together a selection of emerging artists who share a common interest in subverting the sinister effects of capitalism on the environment. As did Emerson in Hamatreya, each artist considers the relationship between humans and the natural world, whether from a spiritual, individual, economic, or political perspective. 

Artist Winnie Sidharta presents a new work that strives to preserve the spiritual and mythological connection to nature ingrained in Indonesian culture. Her intricate tilework documents flashes of memories from her life growing up in the countryside of East Java, and utilizes natural handmade pigments and unique compositions to center the native flora of Indonesia in a spiritual harmony with humans. Similarly, Birgitte Støvring depicts vine-like patterns inspired by her gardens in the Danish countryside, a place where the artist strengthened her practice by examining the mythological importance of nature, feminism, and her conception of the modern goddess. In her own way, Pearl Cowan imbues religious spirituality rather than mysticism into her depictions of flowers set amongst the forests and waterfalls. In response to her departure from the Christian church, her work seeks to utilize sacred geometries and biblical hierarchies to denote the church of nature as an equally holy place for all.

Alexander Deschamps continues this transcendental exploration of the human relationship to nature by taking inspiration from pop culture, cartoons, and signage. He questions human dominion in a tongue-in-cheek style. Deschamps depicts a happy housecat sitting beside a vase of cut flowers patterned with a repeating cat motif, calling into question the commodification of nature and animals.  

In the second to final stanza of Emerson’s Hamatreya, the earth cries out in song, wondering how humans can claim ownership of the planet that holds them and provides for them. Artist Alissa Alfonso opposes this human error of over-industrialization by giving secondhand and discarded materials a second life. In an effort to inspire and ensure the preservation of the future, Alissa Alfonso repurposes commercial and industrial waste like soccer balls, tennis balls, scrap textiles, found metal objects, and fused plastics in her soft sculptures. 

Now more than ever, climate activists are pushing back against the capitalist machine and its disregard for the survival of humans and nature alike. Cruz Ortiz’s paintings work to recontextualize social-political issues the settler state tries to erase from the collective consciousness. His paintings capture the duality of nature and the human condition, exploring the universality of memory post-identity and post-borders. Daniela Gomez Paz threads the autobiographical through the wider communal fabric of the familial in her weavings constructed from organic materials, fabricated objects, and natural and synthetic fibers. She is engaging with craft techniques to explore the influence of global footprints on social movements and local communities. 

This exhibition is curated in dedication to the continuation of the Transcendentalist reverence of divine nature and to the modern environmentalist movement working to save our planet.

We at Alanna Miller have similarly interrogated our relationship to the environment and have joined the Gallery Climate Coalition in solidarity with the art world’s attempts to reduce its environmental impact. Partial proceeds from this exhibition will be donated to the Billion Oyster Project, a local nonprofit committed to restoring one billion oysters to the New York Harbor by 2035.

View Exhibition

About Cruz Ortiz

Cruz Ortiz makes oil paintings inextricable from his relationship to the land and engages in the complicated politics of the Texan landscape. Combining traditional studio techniques like painting and sculpture with contemporary video and performance, Ortiz began his practice as a romantic art historical form of documentation. His natural paintings come partly from direct observation and partly from visions of the future, a future built on art’s recontextualization of social-political issues that the settler state tries to erase from collective memory.

Based in Texas, Ortiz has committed himself to creatively collaborating with cultural arts organizations and social justice organizations for most of his career. He was also a public high school instructor for 15 years, working with diverse urban students. Cruz Ortiz has had solo exhibitions at ARTPACE in San Antonio, Texas; the Contemporary Art Museum in Houston, Texas; the University of Texas in Austin; The Museum of Contemporary Art in Santa Barbara, in Santa Barbara, California; and the Judd Foundation, in Marfa, Texas. He has been invited to participate in many major international exhibitions and institutions such as the Louvre in Paris, France; EV-A in Limerick, Ireland; the traveling exhibition Phantom Sightings with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California; the San Juan Triennial in San Juan, Puerto Rico; and at The Blue Coat Museum, in Liverpool, England. His work is in the permanent collections of Ruby City, the San Antonio Museum of Art, the University of Texas at San Antonio Library Special Collections, the Arizona State University Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery.

About Winnie Sidharta

Winnie Sidharta works with painted tiles and raw handmade pigments to create her body of work that investigates collective cultural experience through the depiction of species of flora and fauna both native and sacred to Indonesian culture. She places an emphasis on the importance of the natural world in relation to the cultural consciousness she explores.

Her vibrant collages have the effect of lush foliage, extending a legacy of craftswomen and complex recollections of time, memory, and identity from her layered canvases. Most recently, Winnie Sidharta's work in Delft tiles allows the mutable, living quality of the painted image to carry emotive scenes of generational postcolonial trauma. Her paintings and tilework capture her own fleeting memories from childhood and the nature she observed and lived. Her paintings depict flowers and foliage native to East Java, preserving and uplifting their beauty and importance.

Based in Queens, NY, Sidharta has exhibited in galleries and museums internationally, from Indonesia to China and across the United States, in California, South Carolina, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and New York. She studied Visual Communication Design in Indonesia and Painting in Beijing, China. In 2010, she received her MFA in Painting and Drawing from The Ohio State University and later taught there before settling in New York City in 2014.

About Pearl Cowan

Pearl Cowan paints landscapes that center nature in such a way that conveys divine meaning and an uplifting of the natural to a supernatural, divine position. Inspired by her own experience detaching from the Christian faith, her paintings combine the natural and the mathematical. Cowan includes repeating geometric forms to create spiritual tension between the man-made, the natural, and the divine. 

Her vast landscapes expand outward behind her monumental flowers, evoking romantic representations of nature as seen in the work of the Hudson Valley School artists. Inspired by underlying geometry and hierarchies once used to convey divine meaning in Christian art, Cowan recalibrates convention to convey a broader sense of spirit and mystery in the world. Pearl Cowan received a BFA from The University Of Texas at San Antonio, San Antonio, TX.

About Alissa Alfonso

Alissa Alfonso’s floral soft sculptures are made from second-hand materials, which uplift quickly disappearing natural elements in the pursuit of preservation. Using discarded soccer balls, tennis balls, fabric, and textile shoddy, Alfonso repurposes the past in the hopes of a continued future. Based in Florida, Alfonso observes firsthand the rapid change in our climate. 

Based in Florida, she utilizes delicate hand-dyed fabric and textiles to create her soft-sculpture models, often depicting medicinal plants and botanicals traditionally ingested by humans for their nourishing properties. Her pieces are made from, echo, or dissolve into their environments, featuring a unique variety of upcycled materials that include repurposed fabrics, found metal objects, and fused plastics. Much of Alfonso’s work is designed to involve the surrounding community and actively connect the community to the environment.

About Daniela Gomez Paz

Daniela Gomez Paz crafts intersections between weaving, embroidery, painting, assemblage, and sculpture. She turns organic material, fabricated objects, natural and synthetic fibers into terrains in and of themselves allowing her to thread the autobiographical through the wider communal fabric of the familial. From this threading, she grapples with constructions of femininity and processes the inner workings of the body in relation to the non-human world. 

Her connection to color is an intuitive practice that interweaves personal memory with the tactility of nature’s impermanence. Through an intercorporeal approach with material, she makes micro and macroscale narratives reflective of everyday cycles of life, traces remnants of migratory events, and transcribes her mestizaje.

Gomez Paz draws from her Colombian-American experience and is inspired by the ancestral knowledge of weaving patterns as a form of storytelling. Her relationship with craft merges the healing benefits of textile art processes supported by expressive arts therapy research and considers the global footprints craft practices have held in feminist mobilization movements.

Daniela Gomez Paz received a BFA in Painting/Printmaking and a BA in Art History from SUNY Purchase College, a MAT: Masters in Teaching from Queens College, and an MFA in Painting/Printmaking from Yale University. Currently, she is a lecturer at SUNY Purchase.

About Birgitte Støvring

Birgitte Støvring channels ancient goddesses of harvest and fertility in her large paintings, emphasizing the importance of reconnecting with the land. Støvring lives and works out of Egtved, Denmark and her work combines vibrant colors with geometric shapes and figures to explore ritual acts, the meeting of abstraction and figuration, and the human body's eternal interaction with its surroundings. Her shifting fields of color morph and transform against the boundaries of her forms and generate symbolic dual imagery, creating an electric presentation of color and concept. 

Drawing from the time-old wellspring of feminine mythology, Støvring considers ancestry, womanhood, and collective ideas of birth and cyclicality to parse out her own personal connection to a higher power—to a greater divine. This reconnection to a higher power is strengthened by Støvring’s reconnection to nature. Hailing from a long line of horticulturalists, Støvring is exploring the power of nature, cultivation, harvest, and fertility as they relate to land and womanhood.

Birgitte Støvring received her MFA from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen. She has participated in a considerable number of solo and group shows across Denmark and Eastern Europe and has been commissioned to produce work for the Danish government. 

About Alexander Deschamps

Alexander Deschamps creates work ranging from bright, pop-inspired pastel drawings on burlap depicting animals and foliage in joyous harmony with man and environment, to animations condemning the desecration of the planet with imagery of exploding planets. Deschamps borrows language from cartoons and pop culture to drive his point, often pairing his signature bright color palette with the representation of darker themes.

He has an active studio practice based in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Signage, graphics, cartoons, textures, and found objects are re-contextualized in collaged layers to create new histories, combined with elements of comedy, tragedy, pop, and politics. Alexander Deschamps received a Bachelor in Fine Arts from NYU in 2009.

About Alanna Miller

With over ten years of experience as an art dealer working with private collectors and corporate hospitalities, Alanna Miller is opening a new gallery space at 230 Mulberry Street in New York City, bringing her art advisory expertise to the storefront. The gallery will function as a dynamic, thoughtful space dedicated to emerging art.

Alanna Miller received her MA in Modern and Contemporary Art and the Market from Christie's Education in New York. She was sales assistant to blue chip art advisor Kim Heirston and Sales Director of Artemisa Gallery in New York City, specializing in emerging and contemporary Latin American art. Following her time with Artemisa, she spent several years in the specialized business of fine art licensing with Bridgeman Images. Alanna Miller brings a uniquely and carefully honed perspective into the gallery.