CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 3/22/2022

'(Nothing but) Flowers' is NEW from Karma Books, New York

Sanya Kantarovsky’s “As ye sow, so shall ye reap” (2020) is reproduced from Karma Books’ gorgeous, 464-page (Nothing but) Flowers, a staff favorite new release under any conditions, but also the perfect book to feature as we move ahead from the vernal equinox into the Spring of all Springs. “Fleeting love, enduring love, the steady cyclical pace of seasonal time, the commemoration of death’s omnipresent singularity, a tribute to beauty, flowers are always working in the service of the passage of time,” Helen Molesworth writes. “I think those of us who pick flowers and put them in vases, and those who make still life arrangements and paint them, are doubling down on the daily. In all of the paintings in this book where flowers are depicted, innocently standing in their vases, the minor gestures of gathering, arranging and display can be seen as a verb list dedicated to world-building. The artist Lari Pittman once told me that the decorative is a way of managing the great barbarity of the world, a means to keep the radical contingency and cruel unknowability of what is going to happen next at bay. This means that the decorative is a strategy against violence, and in that regard it’s no mistake that the decorative has long been the province of the historically disenfranchised—women, servants, queers—charged with the tasks of keeping house and maintaining culture.”