The Art of Plant Arrangement
At first glance, you encounter grids of atmospheric color. Within each square, something is blooming. Thumbnails for Rick Silva’s BLOOMCORE, a project for which he had 3D-scanned living plants throughout the Pacific Northwest. From university greenhouses, coastal redwoods, the high desert, and the Cascade Mountains, all that remains is something blooming beneath the light. That’s how it feels in Silva's work – like you’re standing beneath layers upon layers of lush green forestry, you’re trapped at the bottom, yet the light shines through.
It feels disorienting once the video plays, once the camera begins to spin around in a smooth glide circling the blossom. But suddenly, as the blooming shape exposes the centered light source in the space over and over again, you feel almost omniscient. No longer does the eternal hyper-flora feel alive, they feel weak and weightless – wilting in the palm of your hand as you rotate it to your will.
BLOOMCORE does not bloom in the traditional way. As a solo exhibition hosted on Feral File, a hybrid site of an online gallery, a marketplace, and an NFT publisher, it’s a noticeable departure from the experience of wandering through a New York City art gallery. And even more so, the exhibition might be completely incomparable to how it might feel to experience actual nature with all its warmth touching your face and all its freshness between your fingers. Nothing less than pressed flowers and dried ones, Silva’s flowers and ferns and forests are encased eternally in all their digitized glory. While most of the real-life plants that Silva scanned in the Spring of 2022 may have rotted away, they are, as curator Claire L. Evans describes, “preserved in perpetuity, on the blockchain, like museum specimens.” She continues with anecdotes on “dendrophobia,” or the fear of trees – “A man stricken to paralysis by the gnarled roots of banyan trees,” “the whooshing sound of leaves in the wind,” a preschooler inconsolable after witnessing a tree that he swears wasn’t there yesterday. There’s a certain element of doom and gloom in the plants of BLOOMCORE. It’s the rigid and murky colored stems. It’s the extraterrestrial and discomforting petals. It’s the tangled and chaotic blobs of green. Everything is placed far too close for your liking. As the plant rotates, its uncanny limbs clip in and out of the fourth wall. Maybe its digital medium suddenly feels comforting, with the knowledge that the composites will never exist in real life to wrap their stems around you.
In a conversation with Silva titled “Ikebana Meets Gene Splicing,” Evans asks if the plants in the show were composites or if they actually existed in nature. Silva replies, “They both exist in nature and are composites. While the polygons and textures are sourced from actual physical plants, in the digital version they are positioned in this way that only virtual space can intersect objects.”
In a similar vein, Ikebana, the classic Japanese art of flower arrangement, fuses flowers, leaves, and stems into a flourishing composition. For a while, after originating in Japan during the Heian period, Ikebana largely existed without any one dominant meaning, simply serving as offerings in temple offerings and ancestral shrines. However, upon its arrival in China, the art of flower arrangement inspired notions of the Buddhist desire to preserve life. The practice of Ikebana had now developed into a way to prolong the life of the flower, a beautiful attempt to preserve the fleeting moments of nature. Despite this, there is something melancholic about the art of flower arranging. The effort to unify different flowers together into an arrangement often involves snipping off blossoms and pulling off luscious branches, deterring from the natural form while achieving the artistic form. The relationship between art and nature is one of the most complex things that artists may have to face – art if it’s at the expense of the art of nature. It’s a dance between the drive to create and the determination to preserve.
The hyper-flora of Silva’s BLOOMCORE has been trapped forever on view in a virtual museum. Like the art of flower arrangement, this art of plant arrangement blurs a line between art and preservation. There is a discomfort akin to the melancholy of Ikebana – something uncanny that triggers something primal, something horrifying about the nature of plants. The viewing of familiar textures in unfamiliar compositions in the digital medium on the blockchain feels incorrect. What does it mean when the natural is virtual?
There is something undeniably ironic about 3D-scanning and digitizing nature, something paradoxical about the art of plants hosted as NFTs. During the rise and subsequent fall of the hype surrounding non-fungible tokens in recent years, various subjects of constant criticism have plagued it. A prominent point of contention involved the negative effects that NFTs had on the environment. Ethereum, the blockchain platform that handled most NFT transactions including Silva’s BLOOMCORE, “demanded substantial amounts of computational power and energy to validate and record new transactions, leading to significant carbon emissions.” Hopefully, by now, the negative effects of significant unnecessary carbon emissions on the environment is on its way to be defined as common knowledge. However, it should be noted that BLOOMCORE was minted and compiled in April of 2023, less than a year after Ethereum pivoted its system of how it verified transactions, with its new infrastructure now consuming around 99.95% less energy than before – its first attempt at reducing its environmental impact since its founding in 2015.
“Plants are always watching us,” writes Evans in her curatorial statement, “They’re alive.”
Maybe the plants remember. Maybe the perpetual state of death that the mangled and blotchy plants of BLOOMCORE on the blockchain now has an inherent meaning. In nature, plants rarely exist in singularity. Perhaps that is what’s so scary about it all. The plants of BLOOMCORE is a composite of various plants, it’s a collection and exhibition of 55 works, more than 55 parts of nature. Silva’s preservation of nature may be something natural to humanity. To preserve greenery, to cut it up and place it in a vase, to press it between pages of dead trees, to scan it and compose it and digitize it. But it’s hard to compare to the vastness, the ancientness, the everlasting, the unknown.
