Artists: June Crespo and Pedro Herrero Ferrán
Exhibition title: 10 best fake flowers
Venue: Yaby, Madrid, Spain
Date: March 1– 19, 2019
Photography: Alberto Vallejo / all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Yaby, Madrid
Rice paper makes good fake flowers. Wax too, maybe, but too much warm touching will eventually melt them. Rice paper you must keep away from liquids or it will incorporate them and change with them, giving itself away under the flower. High heels are, like flowers, symbols for girls to wear to be held in place, in the right place, right posture. Fake high-heeled shoes can be made out of wax, wax melts and melted wax can take any shape it needs to, will fit any shoe, no problem. Dry, it will look like the shoe, it will look the part, no problem, identity test passed, no problem. Warmth, again, will give her back her flow, her sticky-liquid communication through the long chain of shoes worn at different particular moments, connecting one heel to the next, one girl to the next. The unitary image is the high heel and what it does to women’s bodies, what it makes of the girl. The undercurrent is a thread-like leak needling through warm soft melted flesh running prior and posterior to that one high-heeled snap. The symbol is estranged, it loses its unity in identity, reveals that it was only means always, only just another piece of material through which to keep extending, an inevitable and much secondary step for the needle to keep piercing and tying and wiring. Identity, identification, melts into its infrastructure, into mouths, swallowed, into warm holes, out of warm holes, lips. Rice paper stars make good fake identities by sucking in their environment until they break, undoing themselves, breaking character. Grit, ashes of something that was before, swallowed by the skin of the screen, smoothed by oil into every pore. Successive attempts at lo-tech autonomous flowery flight fail as rice paper bird bodies crash into walls, wings heavy with oil and rain against walls, the dream of transcendence cut by continuous accident. Chewing gum in her hair, but the girl in her girl room still keeps her hairpin in place for now, in the right place, for now. A tower hanging from a piece of string, barely touching the ground, that can barely stand on her own, falling from above, erected for now, hanging in there, waiting for the moment to pass, for firm ground to shake her down, to fall back into something else, non-explicit, more wiring, more melting.
