During the artist-talk Jess Hirsch will give an overview of her practice and facilitate a group meditation with the audience in order to demonstrate a part of her performative installation Energetic Flower Stand. The installation will be exhibited at the project Art Experiment, You’re on Air, which will take place from January 2 to 12, 2020.
Jess Hirsch is an artist working at the intersection of sculpture and healing. She studies healing modalities from around the world including Ayurveda, Traditional Chinese Medicine, and North American Herbalism and incorporates aspects from the healing world into simple participatory sculpture. The first portion of her lecture will cover the last seven years of making installations and sculptures. She will cover everything from her project Hot Pot, a dumpster hot tub filled with water to simulate the Blue Lagoon’s healing waters, to Kitchen School, a mobile kitchen used to transform local plants into healing medicine.
The second part of the lecture will focus specifically on The Energetic Flower Stand, a non-traditional flower shop where visitors compose bouquets of flowers that heal various psychological and emotional states. She will discuss the history of flower essences and how they became popularized by Dr. Edward Bach in the 1940s. Hirsch will explain how to make a flower essence as well as how to intuit the healing power of plants. Then she will cover the project itself from the conceptual background to the partnership with Garage and the brilliant assistance of local Moscow artists in creating and implementing the work.
The artist-talk anticipates the project, in which Jess Hirsch’s piece finishes the journey across it. The workshop Energetic Flower Stand combines alternative medicine and art therapy practices. The artist and performative mediators will help visitors to create healing bouquets in which the flowers correspond to particular emotional states. Together with the bouquet, each visitor will be offered one of several walking routes around Moscow. Like the bouquets, these city walks are designed to reflect their mood or improve it.
Art Experiment was launched in 2010 and now is the flagship initiative of Garage Education and Public Programs. Each year’s project differs from the previous one, but the visitor experience is always central. This year Art Experiment explores the poetic, magical, and mnemonic properties of scents.
