“Nature Morte”

Curator Chris Murtha’s tightly packed exhibition handles with grace what might seem to be an unimaginative enterprise: displaying still-life photographs in a horticultural society’s gallery. Of the three artists presented here, only Sharon Core is primarily identified with the genre, though her painstaking re-creations of and riffs on earlier artworks simultaneously engage other artistic lineages, chiefly appropriation art. In recent years, Core has expanded from a detailed exploration of nineteenth-century American painter Raphaelle Peale’s compositions to a sampling of still-life paintings that leaps across centuries. Most of the arrangements are made with flowers, fruits, and vegetables that she grows and tends herself. The remarkable metaphoric expressiveness of these materials hinges, in part, on her control of their state of ripeness or decay.

Corin Hewitt and Miranda Lichtenstein stray somewhat further from the genre’s pictorial conventions, refreshing it in ways distinct from Core’s work. Lichtenstein’s moody untitled series of Polaroids, 2002–2005, depicting flowers and plants in front of painted shadows has an atmospheric pull that belies the works’ small size. The disconnection between foreground and background morphs into a smart meditation on presence and absence in her recent photographs of shadows on backlit paper screens. Hewitt’s newest still lifes are inspired by ikebana flower arrangements, but likewise draw from a visual language of sharp edges and colorful backgrounds familiar from advertising and design. (Iranian photographer Shirana Shahbazi has created similar looking photographs.) Each composition contains objects—logs, stones, metal wires, flowers—used during a recent performance in Miami. Here, isolated against seamless bright red or dull gray, Hewitt’s unexpected combinations come off like fetishes or relics from an inexplicable but enticing ritual.