Megumi Shinozaki: edenworks: Now/Then

Nonaka-Hill is delighted to present Now/Then, an exhibition of flower-based creations by Megumi Shinozaki. As a practitioner of flower arrangement in her home city of Tokyo, she has expanded to include paper sculpture and installation in recent years. Converting the gallery into a two-part multiflorous display, Shinozaki’s approach is at once visceral and contemplative, revealing the otherwise dormant potentials of her craft. She demonstrates this upon our entrance to the gallery––an oversized floral flourishment is rooted in the ceiling––under which we gaze up into the “growth”; it is as if a wild garden has swung over our heads, for we are now in the flowers’ perspective and the flowers have the perspective of the “sky.” As the exhibition is open through the weeks, the flowers dry, eeking into their unique curvatures during dehydration. Shinozaki will inevitably have this mass of florescence packaged into groupings that will exist on their own accord and be dispersed. The same fate awaits flowers like poppies and roses and lilies and dahlias and muscaris––those sirens for the bees, which Shinozaki has recreated in paper: In her Paper Eden series, she sculpts colored paper over wire to deftly mimick different species, each of their stems sprouting from a single stone––a new meaning to the game of Rock paper scissors. But it is also a reference to the flower/vase binary, in which nature is ordered and inserted into a human-made object; now reversed, Shinozaki’s artificial flowers reside in a natural one. Yet we find ourselves chasing our tails: Her works originate in wood pulp, reminding us that our raw materials derive from the earth and that the natural/unnatural divide is illusory. Originally trained as a dressmaker, Shinozaki has brought her expertise into a sprawling range of contexts that include advertising, commercials, music videos, and product packaging. She has founded several flower-based projects in Tokyo, such as EW.Pharmacy, where customers can mix dried flowers of their choosing into various combinations, thus affording them a second aesthetic life. She has overgrown the function of flower arrangement by cultivating the artificial and highlighting the flower’s ephemerality—the underlying concept of Now/Then.