Flowers, Ruin, Everything

These works express some of Luper’s ideas on communication and reality.

The play on words in the title calls into question the meaning of flowers and how flowers mean. Luper uses flowers to bring attention to the ways in which we try to condense intangible and complicated ideas into something we can touch and smell. Love is a rose, nobility a peony, innocence a daisy. Does this transition from intangible into flower sacrifice the truth and the full power those ideas and feelings hold or is it a testament to the overflowing nature of those truths? Do flowers, like most means of expression, fall short of the truth they represent or are they a piece of the truth for us to hold onto momentarily? 

Buildings, cranes, garbage, and rooftops appear among the layers of floral imagery to reinforce the metaphysical transition of feelings to flowers with the physical changes happening all around us. While in some instances the imagery is solitary and meditative other times the images are abstracted into almost unrecognizable objects and markings to create a dream feeling where time and place meld into one. Luper choice of the collage format depicts what he believes is a more accurate representation of how we construct our reality. 

There is an energy in a collage that reflects the essence of our existence. That energy exists in the peculiar ability a collage possesses to be both jarring and balanced. The depiction of different places, times, shapes, and colors on the same plane allows the audience to visualize something that is closer to the true nature of reality. The collage works like a still frame of a collective dream, allowing the audience to study and interact with a complex system of information that represents our reality. The audience can correspond with the nostalgia these pieces evoke while the uncertain familiarity with the scenery and objects creates a mystery. The mystery is what is alive in these pieces, the energy at work.