5 MACDONOUGH ST | JUNE 7 - JUNE 21, 2025

In Florescent : Gorgeous Persistence

In its inaugural exhibition, REDHEAD is pleased to present In Florescent : Gorgeous Persistence, a multidisciplinary show highlighting the work of contemporary artists Geoffrey Aldridge, Mary O’Brien Spurrier, and Melissa Oresky. The project space will host an opening reception on Saturday, June 7, from 2 - 5 PM.

Florescence is a state of flourishing. As a verb derivative, it describes both the state of blooming, growing, and to be at the peak of one’s power. As an adjective, it refers to a source or reference within the work, flora in particular.

In language, we associate words with objects to ascribe meaning to both the word and the object. A leaf, a singular visual mapped from a narrative of deciduous trees is simplistic in both form and content. A leaf’s shape can be elliptical, sagittate, orbicular. The arrangement of its stems can be opposite, alternate, whorled, and yet, the word leaf is understood to be flat and green, attached to a stem, and connected to a tree. To understand a leaf in this manner oversimplifies the complexity and beauty of leaves. Even if language can be simplified, it is from that simplification that allows for the artists in this exhibition to persist in pursuit of a fluid narrative, while expanding the form, which allows for a conversation on complexity, beauty, and transformation. 

Geoffrey Aldridge states that: “Having a multi-disciplinary practice is a direct response to ‘queering’ the content I’m interested in exploring. Queering, for me, is a philosophy and a verb.” His recent work in clay allows him to focus on transformation through a raw, physical relationship with the material. He draws on everyday objects - carrots, rose stems, knives - to question meaning and function while bending and expanding boundaries.

In Mary O’Brien Spurrier’s Covid Pop series, the repetition of the spore is the starting point and a recurring form that populates the work. The layered images multiply and mutate, much like the virus itself. Yet here, the image is beautiful and ecstatic, while the reminders of isolation and invisible threat lingers on the periphery of our memory. The spore is tenacious if not gorgeous in its persistence.

The language of plants and their aliveness serves as both the subject and structure for Melissa Oresky’s practice. She describes her studio as an ecosystem. The way the work is constructed mimics a process of growing, where byproducts and scraps from one work provide material for the next work. And in the paintings, collages, prints, and sculptures she references the page as a way to draw a connection between language in humans and language in plants.