Artist: James Flowers
Title: "UNTITLED (lavender metameric)"
Size: 27" x 42" x 5"
Medium: Encaustic, Enamel, Oil, Acrylic, Inkjet, Polaroid, and Wood
Value: $1,600
Artist Statement:

My practice flows between sculpture, installation, and photography to explore how memory and culture shift, fragment, and adapt over time. Rather than forcing meaning onto materials, I respond to their qualities, pairing them with images that reflect memory, possibility, or imagined histories. These elements come together as works that are neither complete nor fixed spaces where old meanings fade and new ones begin to form. I think of culture as a living organism that adapts in response to pressure and environment. I am interested in the places where personal memory and collective history intersect, divide, and reconfigure into something new. The work embraces hybridity, contradiction, and the openness of not knowing. My process is slow-paced, iterative, and often uncertain. I work toward an emotional tone rather than a clear conclusion. I let the materials guide the composition, allowing them the freedom to do as they wish. Sometimes memory informs a piece, most ofen the physical qualities of the materials take the lead. This openness creates room for unexpected connections and meaning to emerge naturally.

Artist Bio:

James Flowers is a second-generation Vietnamese American interdisciplinary artist working primarily in sculpture, installation, and photography. Growing up in an assimilating household of teenage refugees with broken English as his foundational tongue, Flowers gravitated toward visual and gestural language as an effective means of expression. Flowers' work investigates his cultural lineage and the histories that brought his family to America, while simultaneously speculating on the future, forgotten and unknown pasts, and the synthesis of it all. Flowers earned his BFA from the Columbus College of Art & Design in 2024, with a concentration in sculpture and a minor in business. In 2023, he attended the prestigious Yale Norfolk School of Art, through Yale University. He was awarded a fellowship to the Vermont Studio Center in 2025, where he will complete a residency this coming autumn.