Walking through the new exhibition “Expanded Field: Photography from the Collection of the NBMAA.” at the New Britain Museum of American Art, an extensive photography survey highlighting over 100 works from the Museum’s collection, Jane O’Neal’s photograph “Blue Java Bud,” layered in intense reds and oranges in the shape of an upside dewdrop arrests my attention. In her 2009 image she created for her “Environmental memory: home Grown Series, O’Neal, plucks and pulls backyard plants and places her “sitters” onto her “scanner to produce nuanced, calibrated inkjet prints on archival paper.”
Image Credit: DNJ Gallery
http://www.dnjgallery.net
Her botanical study resembling medieval hand-drawn illustrations, “Blue Java Bud,” as writer Shana Nys Dambrot wrote, “whiffs of the semi-clinical, sexualized near-abstractions of Edward Weston;” the floral bud evokes a clitoral character with its “cauterized umbilical stem nub and enfolding deep purple husk.” Both Weston and O’Neal employ the same subject matter, exploring the elements of the translucent flesh in the female forms seductive and alluring petals. For more information about the New Britain Museum of American Art exhibition and other photography works, please check out their website. http://www.nbmaa.org
