FLUXUS - NEW YORK - LA - MIAMI

About every half-century it seems, we humans throw ourselves into a new era of self-destruction, usually chasing the mirage of power, regardless of the high failure rate. The cost is large for both destroyer and repairer, always revealing a fragile brute behind a gilded façade. So, the next generation’s repairers mend what is broken. Some of us get cut while the rest of us repair. Mend and destroy and heal again, until our scars build a stronger topography- both on land and skin- and we start again like a flower pushing through a stone. In 2018, I photographed the Ukrainian military. As Bucha fell in early 2022, I went to my studio and cut up my flower portraits on canvas, flowers being deeply threaded throughout Ukrainian and Russian cultures. I began reconstructing the flowers with a new skin, the flux of the canvas against the chrome of a zipper. The original map, restored. The strength in a scar. Paul Solberg, Manhattan, January 2023