Xaviera Simmons
Today (Floral K), 2023
6x8, framed
Color Photograph
Edition 1/3

About Xaviera:

Xaviera Simmons’ sweeping practice includes photography, painting, video, sound, sculpture, text and installation. Her work engages the formal histories of art through the construction of landscape, language, and the complex histories of the United States and its continuing empire building internally and on a global scale. 

From humanity’s earliest recorded histories, the flower has served an intimate, sensual, and visceral role as a subject of allegorical meaning. Florals have long ornamented and bloomed across fundamental aspects of life as expressions of mourning, growth, remembrance, love, beauty, ritual, and resistance. In the inverse, flowers have at times been coded as shallow tokens of adornment or decay. Their uses and representations span time, place, and culture, in many ways forming a familiar and unifying grammar that connects human experience across its myriad conditions.