This series of digital images is based on pictures of flowers found in seed and nursery catalogs from the 1960s and 1970s.
The works were created in the Spring of 2020 as the coronavirus pandemic was spreading across the globe. During that time, there were reports of increased sales of flower seed packets. I was struck by the hopefulness of the urge to plant flowers during such a difficult time.
Buying seed packets, whether through online purchases now, or via mail-order catalogs in earlier eras, evokes a journey across time and space. The flower we see pictured on the packet is a representation of what will be realized, eventually, but only after the seeds are shipped, planted, and grown. The distance between the flower image on the seed packet and the flower itself grows even larger when we look at images from old seed catalogs. The flowers grown from packets ordered through these catalogs are now only memories.
The works here explore the chain of mediated representation that links a photograph of a real flower to its presentation in a seed catalog to the archival storage of that seed catalog (in a USDA repository) to its eventual coded representation in the works shown here. The coding of these images separates representation of value (brightness), accomplished via ASCII characters, from hue, in which the source image is reduced to three hues — red, green, blue — which are the basic building blocks of additive color models such as those used to show these digital images as a collection of pixels on screens.
