Venusian Rosaceae (Five Seeded Star) For Queen Morgan & Baby Rose

Industrial cross walk paint, hand/brush applied to concrete by the artist

This groundwork is inspired by the history of the Momentary’s site as a former apple orchard. Venusian Rosaceae explores the myriad of colors, shapes, and symbols associated with apples. Stretching 50 feet in diameter, the circular composition includes layers of five-point stars and infinitely connected braids, referencing the pentagonal shape of an apple’s core and the Dance of Venus—a map of the movement of Venus and Earth around the sun. This work, like most of the artist’s ground murals, serves as an altar to the sky as well as a radically horizontal approach to public monuments. For Molteni, the 2020 Venus retrograde (May 13 to June 25, 2020) was particularly significant as it coincided with the covid era Black Lives Matter uprisings across the globe. During this time Venus was stationed retrograde in the sign of Gemini for the first time since 2012 (the Occupy era). Venus, the planet of values, justice and relationships, challenged us to review our own codes of ethics and take action in the world to back them up. Venusian Rosaceae invites visitors to enter the piece with their minds and bodies, encouraging individual reflection and group responsibility through cycles of power and resistance

This work also reference’s Agnes Martin’s “Wheel of Life”. I often return to this particular passage from “The Untroubled Mind” which gives me much inspiration and frustration:

 Nature is the wheel

When you get off the wheel you’re looking out

You Stand with your back to the turmoil

Classicists are people that look out with their back to the world

To a detached person the complication of the involved life

Is like chaos

If you don’t like the chaos your a classicist

If you like it you’re a romanticist

Agnes overcame her life-long battle with Schizophrenia, while managing a highly successful art career, by exercising visionary classicism and mindfulness. Her mission was to find peace in her own mind. Her paintings sought to provide others with a place to look out and rest. But during moments like a Venus Retrograde I ask myself. Can’t I do both? Look toward the center and out into space, create spaces for action and for rest? Shouldn’t we seek a balance between looking inward and outward? Perhaps, like the blooming Torus, there is no hard line between internal and external.

The work is dedicated to Queen Morgan, a Trans-femme acquaintance of mine and close friend of my assistant Randi. We learned of Morgan’s passing just before the mural was created and continually red about the character “Morgan Queen of Death” in apple mythology. This work is also dedicated to Baby Rose, my first born baby niece, who entered the world on the day we started painting. Rosie shares a birth chart and name-sake with the work, since Roses and Apples are both in the Rosaceae family. This work stands by the ever-blooming spectrum of femme identities and matriarchal muses.

Thanks to Reed Wilson for editing together and creating original music for the video of the piece. Reed utilized the frequencies of the planet Venus and apple blossoms (221.23hz and 639.4hz respectively) along with guitar, synthesizer and singing bowls, to evoke the mood of working on and experiencing the piece. He was asked to incorporate sounds that would call in the cicada friends around the piece and + the ritual ringing of a golden apple bell used in the painting process.

Aerial photos and footage courtesy of The Momentary and Ironside Photography.