Fresh Cut
Megan Mulrooney Gallery, Los Angeles
Benjamin Langford
February 19 – March 29, 2025
Press Release:
Megan Mulrooney is proud to present Fresh Cut, a solo exhibition by Brooklyn-based artist Benjamin Langford. The exhibition features a series of floral wall works depicting species from ranunculus to carnation, alongside a multiply-mediated sunset landscape. Engaging photography, embroidery, sculpture, and painting, Langford investigates how the tools we use to depict the natural world shape our aesthetic and affective experience of it.
Langford’s process begins with meticulously photographing each flower, capturing hundreds of images at varying focal distances. These are composited into a single, hyper-detailed image, with each petal printed on an individual piece of canvas. The artist then stitches these sections together, reconstructing the flower as a draped, dimensional form suspended from the wall by nails. To further enhance their three-dimensional presence, Langford hand-paints the backs of the canvases. The resulting works exist in a space between illusion and physicality—at once hyperreal in their precision and distinctly object-like in their construction.
By shifting scale and perspective, Langford amplifies the natural allure of flowers—the same visual strategies that attract bees now drawing in the human eye. This exploration of visual seduction leads to a broader inquiry: how does technological mediation alter our experience of the organic? And to what extent is perception itself a constructed, rather than innate, phenomenon?
Langford’s engagement with these questions draws from the history of scientific photography, particularly the early 20th-century work of Karl Blossfeldt, who sought to distill botanical structures into archetypal design forms. Langford similarly invokes an “inhuman eye”—a vision beyond human limitations that captures microscopic detail and reconstructs nature through mechanical precision. Yet, by merging this forensic gaze with tactile, handmade processes, he reimagines botanical illustration through a sculptural lens, expanding its ability to translate nature’s complexity into aesthetic form.
A key work in the exhibition, installed in the gallery’s office, extends these inquiries by offering a conceptual counterpoint to the floral wall works. Using a photograph Langford took at the Museum of Natural History as a starting point, this rectangular work depicts a fabricated flower within an artificial landscape. Its hand-painted surface further blurs the boundary between real and simulated nature, underscoring how representation not only mediates but also constructs our perception of the natural world.
Throughout, Langford’s work expands the idea of the sublime—traditionally tied to nature’s awe-inspiring vastness—by demonstrating how mediated images can evoke the same sense of wonder and transcendence once associated with direct encounters. This approach redefines the sublime by introducing reproducible media as a means of accessing the awe and intensity historically reserved for firsthand experiences of the natural world. In doing so, Fresh Cut challenges us to reconsider not only how we see nature, but how we feel it.