From Roses To Text, 
14 – 29 July 2014
Stair 1, Floor 4, TEL Building, York University, Toronto

This typographical installation pays homage to Roland Barthes’s From Text to Work. Discarded roses from apartment front garden were collected, made into letters, and strung into sentences “From Roses to Text” — as a literal denotation to Barthes title. Installed in an underused staircase wall, the roses withered as days fleeted, becoming droopy and faded, one could connote to decay of time and beauty but also of love and the pain often accompanying love. In Emily Bronte’s A Little Budding Rose, the poet compares the rose to love, but to a broken one:

The rose is blasted, withered, blighted,
Its root has felt a worm,
And like a heart beloved and slighted
Failed, faded, shrunk its form.

The dried petals departed from their flower and descended to the ground, just like Bronte described in her poem. What is left through this exhibition are photos of the roses in their letters and words, the experience becoming a text. 


< PREVIOUS SHOW