Artist Talk, Plant Exchange, and Book Reading with Karen Azoulay

Please join us for an artist talk, plant exchange, and book reading with artist and author Karen Azoulay for her new publication, Flowers and Their Meanings.

April 3: 

1) Artist Talk and Studio Visits

Location: Stanford Perrott Lecture Theatre

11:30 to 12:30 pm - Artist Talk

2 to 5 pm - Studio Visits

April 4:

2) Plant Exchange and Flower Show and Tell

Location: Upper Main Mall

1 to 2 pm - Plant Exchange and Flower Show and Tell

Celebrate the arrival of spring with a plant exchange in the Main Mall! Visiting artist Karen Azoulay will be in attendance and offering a show and tell of some her favourite flower treasures. All plants welcome!

3) Flowers and Their Meanings Book Reading and Signing

Location: AUArts Cafeteria Mezzanine Level

5 to 7 pm - Book Reading and Signing from Flowers and Their Meanings

in partnership with Shelf Life books

Cash bar and light refreshments available.

During her extensive period of research, Karen combed through digital archives to compile her own private database of thousands of 19th century botanical illustrations. To create the visual art featured throughout her book, she pulled digital specimens from this cache. Signaling a fresh point of view to the topic, these collages are interjected with her contrasting photographic imagery.

Flowers have been used for rites and rituals since the time of Neanderthals. For her reading at the book signing event, Karen will share some of the most surprising ways that flowers have been used around the world.

Karen Azoulay is a Canadian born, Brooklyn based artist and author whose projects have been featured and reviewed in publications such as the New York Times, New Yorker, Hyperallergic, and Vogue. Azoulay incorporates performance, photography, sculpture and video into her art. She has a fascination with floral symbolism and secret messages are often embedded in her work.

Inspired by "feminine" motifs, Karen Azoulay explores cultural phenomenons that have historically been overlooked with the purpose of re-contextualizing them. Her book Flowers and Their Meanings, The Secret Language and History of Over 600 Blooms (Clarkson Potter / Penguin Random House) chronicles the Victorian Language of Flowers through a contemporary, feminist lens. This nuanced take investigates how the 19th century fad of sending secret messages with carefully composed bouquets came to be. Her talk will touch on some of the relevant aspects of the time such as the correlation between botanical taxonomies and constricting gender norms, the exotification of Middle Eastern and Asian aesthetics, and the revolution in print technology. Women and other marginalized people have used flowers in ingenious methods of covert communication and self-expression. Blooms have been used to heal, poison and even to indict during witch trials.

These events are open to all!

Photography courtesy Ryan Slack