Carol Dragon

There is a Latin phrase you may know: memento mori — remember that you will die. This work asks you to hold its counterpart: memento vivere — remember to live.

Every still life here began with flowers at the peak of their beauty. Some are captured at that moment of fullness. Others are woven — literally, physically woven — with images of those same flowers after they have died. Strip by strip, the living and the dead are interlaced into a single surface. Past and future pressed together, inseparable.

The woven pieces draw on another life: Carol Dragon studied fiber art at RISD, and she spent the first decade of her career making woven sculptures before moving into painting and then photography. That history doesn't stay in the past. It surfaces here, threaded into the present work.

The frames belong to time as well. Handmade by a craftsman friend, these gold leaf frames are fifty years old — each one unique in texture, proportion, and depth. Dragon paired each frame to its image intuitively, as a collaborator. The result is a work that is less photograph than object: layered, dimensional, insistently physical.

Still life has long been the genre of impermanence. Dragon draws on the tradition she loves — Modigliani, Hockney, Learoyd — but adds the axis of time itself. Looking at these images, you hold both states at once: the bloom and the withering, the living moment and its end. Not as tragedy. As the full truth of being alive.

Nothing here is entirely dead. Nothing is entirely alive. In weaving them together, Dragon has given them both a kind of eternity.