at The Notting Hill Centre for Artistry
It is rare to attend an art exhibition and leave feeling like you’ve been mugged,not physically, but conceptually. Emotionally. Spiritually. Robbed of time, patience, and your basic understanding of what constitutes “art” versus, say, laundry nailed to a wall. And yet, here we are. Turgid Bloom: A Fertile Collapse in Nine Petals is the latest offering from Bravely M. Jorb, and it is, without question, the most sanctimonious arrangement of floral detritus and art-school word salad I have ever had to witness.
Jorb describes the show as “an odyssey through post-floric semiotics and the latent fertility of failure.” What does that mean? Come with me into the exhibition…
The exhibition is divided into “petals”,nine individual rooms, each allegedly representing a stage in the life cycle of a fictional plant called the Myxoliva spasmata, invented by Jorb “as a rejection of botanical imperialism.” There is a diagram. It includes several question marks, the word “blossom” written backward, and a drawing that suspiciously resembles a giraffe in repose.
Petal I: Germination of Grief is a pile of shredded calendars under a heat lamp. Every five minutes, a fog machine puffs out the scent of mildew while a speaker hidden in the wall emits the sound of someone inhaling deeply, then sighing as if disappointed in you personally. I made eye contact with a stranger across the room and saw myself reflected in their haunted stare: it was unnerving.
In Petal IV: Chlorophyll Envy, visitors are invited to walk across a floor covered in dried wasabi peas while a performer in an over-sized bee costume reads Rilke aloud through a kazoo. A large sign above the doorway warns: “EXPECT TO FEEL POLLINATED.” I did not. I felt irritated and slightly dehydrated, but some of that was my fault for forgetting my water bottle.
The so-called “centerpiece” of the show is Petal VI: Wilt Ritual, a towering sculpture of rotting carnations zip-tied to a metal coat rack, slowly rising and falling according to the weather forecast whilst a slowed-down MIDI version of “The Girl from Ipanema” played on a nearby iPod Nano. I cannot explain to you how viscerally wrong this felt. There are certain things the brain is not built to process, and this is one of them. A child walked in, looked at it for five seconds, and burst into tears. The mother just said, “I know,” and they left without another word.
By the time I arrived at Petal IX: Compost of the Self, I was so broken down I barely flinched when asked to write my “emotional pH level” on a piece of organic rice paper and bury it in a trough of blueberries. I have no idea what the artist was trying to achieve.
The gallery assistants,all dressed in burlap sacks and wearing “scent halos” (necklaces soaked in fermented rosewater),hovered nearby, ready to explain that “each work destabilizes the flower as symbol and repositions it as a wound.” At no point did anyone explain why I had to watch endless CDs of Beethoven’s Fifth falling from the ceiling into a washing-up bowl of green paint.
Let me be clear: Turgid Bloom is not a conversation with nature. It is not a deconstruction. It is not even a critique. It is a profoundly tedious episode of self-worship dressed up in florid metaphors and bad lighting. It is a PowerPoint presentation with delusions of grandeur. It is Bravely M. Jorb holding a bouquet of rotting symbolism and slapping you in the face with it while whispering, “How do you like these apples?”
One star. Everything in the show deserves to be pruned, mulched, and never spoken of again.
