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When I begin a new series, I make sure I remember what inspired me to do so. With the flower series (Floralessence) the inspiration actually came from viewers of the Biologic series. So many told me that the piece entitled “My Favorite Places” looked very much like hydrangea, and so it was that I decided to pursue a floral motif featuring floral images I have shot over the years. I remove the flower from its background and, as in Biologic, place these cut paper elements onto elevated sheets of glass. It seemed at the time to be a natural evolution and I could continue to reference shape, color and the illusion of depth using a more colorful palette and more complex organic shape that possessed unmistakable beauty.
Group Show | Maine Museum of Photographic Arts, Portland, ME
Review by Jorge Arango, Maine Sunday Telegram, 7-24-22
Woodruff throws reality to the wind. His process in this latest series is to take hundreds of photographs of flowers, print them onto paper and cut them by hand, then lay them in collaged groupings on several sheets of glass separated a few inches from each other. He also trains light in between the layered composition so that the resulting single image is actually one of looking down through the layers.
It becomes impossible, then, to view the flat image and determine which blossoms are at what depth, or whether floral images are actually abutting others on the same layer or through multiple layers. These images are pure artifice, but also mind-bending in a way that scrambles our perceptive capacities. Our brain and eyes cannot exactly discern what it is we're looking at, what is forefront and what is background.
Woodruff's previous series, where he applied the same process to photos of stars in the night sky, moonlight or sunlight, remain for me far more interesting, mainly because they had the added perceptual confusion of seeming to actually emanate points of light, as if illuminated by little LED bulbs behind the print. It is not that these are not interesting; they are. And they have a chaotic lushness that captures flowers at their ripest moment -- bright, fully opened and in your face -- which inevitably also implies decay and death, pointing to the impermanence of things. We can see them as both fecund and funereal.
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