Karen Kraven- Bloemenlust
Feb 22, 2025 - May 10, 2025
Karen Kraven- Bloemenlust
Date: February 22, 2025 - May 10, 2025
Location: Oakville Galleries at Gairloch Gardens, 1306 Lakeshore Road East, Oakville.
To accept death in the garden and in life, one must endure torrential downpours, drought, uncertainty and yield gaps. Forgetting clock time, the barefoot gardener walks “the long unwinding spiral of rot and fertility,”1 unclogging downspouts and mulching roses for winter.
Karen Kraven is interested in the vulnerability and potential of the body through exertion, work, and grief. Accessing her familial background in fashion and textiles and accumulating the surplus possessions and fabric scraps that drift in the periphery of the body, her work defoliates, lingers, eventually propagating.
Bloemenlust at Oakville Galleries presents new and recent works by Karen Kraven, whose sculptures and installations navigate the politics of pleasure and pain within the cut-flower industry. These works intertwine themes of illness, grief, and the deceptive allure of redemptive productivity. What does it mean to inhabit a body—under duress, under capitalism?