Megumi Shinozaki: Now/Then

6917 Melrose Avenue Los Angeles CA 90038

Nonaka-Hill is pleased to present Now/Then, an exhibition of flower-based creations by Tokyo, Japan based artist, Megumi Shinozaki.

Working from her background as a florist in her home city of Tokyo, Megumi Shinzoaki has expanded her practice to include paper sculpture and grand scale floral installations. Her approach is at once visceral and contemplative, revealing the otherwise dormant potentials of her floral craft.

An oversized installation of fresh flowers appearing to be rooted in the ceiling overwhelms upon entering the gallery, as if a wild garden has grown over our heads. We gaze up into their “growth”, inverting the flowers’ perspective with our point of view. Over the eight weeks duration of the exhibition, the flowers will dehydrate and transform into their unique organic curvatures. 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, 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 mimic various species, each of their stems sprouting from a single rock. Referencing the flower/vase binary, in which nature is ordered and inserted into a human-made object; Shinozaki’s reverses the norms bringing artificial flowers to reside in a natural stone “vase”.

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. Shinozaki founded several inventive flower-based projects in Tokyo, such as EW.Pharmacy, where customers can mix dried flowers of their choosing into various combinations. Having overgrown the sculptural discipline of flower arrangement, Shinozaki highlights the flower’s ephemerality and cultivates the artificial to reveal the underlying concept of Now/Then; a site-specific expression of life.