Amid painted white walls and casual mingling, the usual stuffiness of a night at the gallery was challenged by something … blooming? While the rain cast last Thursday evening in a soggy winter robe, the interior of The Opening Gallery on Walker Street held the supposed promise of spring with Marita Pappa’s exhibition The Poignancy of Perpetual Spring. Framed mosaics of scattered fabric flowers exuded vibrancy with petals reaching out to viewers from the walls and the floor. Looking past the imagery of the upcoming season and toward the symbolism of the flowers’ material component, the exhibition turned beauty that is commonly ephemeral into a permanent spectacle. 

For artist Marita Pappa, born in Greece and visiting New York City on a Fulbright scholarship with the Fine Arts department at Parsons School of Design, artificial flowers colored the background of her youth. “I grew up in a house where there were fake flowers, and my mom loved them,” Pappa said. “So, I think unconsciously that’s why I was so aware of them.” Touching down in New York this past August, Pappa hit the ground, well, walking. “Everything starts with a walk,” she said. “I can walk around aimlessly for hours, and in a way that gave birth to this work.” 

Pappa’s artist residency in New York City is unique due to her being one of only two Fulbright scholar recipients from Greece. Speaking to creating art in the epicenter of creative-making landscapes, she wanted to capture the special circumstances of her visit. “I knew that I wanted to do something about the city, and I had to find my way of existence within it,” Pappa said. “It’s something that has been drawn, it’s been sung, so many times, so how do I penetrate? … It’s an impossible task.” 

In order to avoid the paralysis of pursuing originality, Pappa combined her previous research of public spaces and her personal practices. “I just need[ed] to go back to my roots … understanding the streets, walking around,” she said, recalling her initial mindset on this project.

Walking New York City’s sidewalks with her Polaroid camera in hand, Pappa documented the artificial flowers weaving around the exterior of restaurants and storefronts. Through her research, Pappa learned that the awkward existence of these fake flowers could be tied to New York in a post-pandemic context. She noticed that in the wake of the citywide trauma of COVID-19, the artificial flower market was booming, and according to her research, this spike matched those in times after the Great Recession and post-war periods. 

Citing anthropologist Margaret Mead, the inclusion of these flowers in public displays offered “a coping mechanism,” according to Pappa — a decorative permanence to mask structural misery. However, Pappa recognized that there was a lack of awareness of their artificiality, and in their presence at large, despite their use by store owners as a marketing tool. This was just one of the many dichotomies Pappa portrayed in her art.

“I wanted to introduce … the dichotomy of the private and the public,” Pappa said. In reference to her research of cityscapes in transition, Pappa hoped to ask in her art, “For who is this public space, what’s left of it? Because most public spaces are privately owned … The city is changing, but the city is changing for who?” 

Pappa’s show was curated by The Opening Gallery’s founder and curator Dr. Sozita Goudouna, who became interested in Pappa’s art for her conceptual framework and her mix of mediums. “I was interested to see the dialogue between the installation and the Polaroids,” Goudouna said. 

In the first room at the gallery, there were three frames filled with fabric flowers, two hanging on the left wall, and one placed on the floor emulating a pond of multicolored lily pads. The fabric was sourced from M&S Schmalberg, a New York-based artificial flower company which has provided the city with falsified florals since 1916. “I took their discarded materials and I recreated every single [flower]. They are all painstakingly handmade,” Pappa said with a laugh. 

Not all the fabric flowers were modeled from the flowers she walked by, however. “Most of them are completely out of my own imagination. When the future of flowers is artificial, how far do you go?” she said, smiling and mentioning that the wandering mind of her toddler, also roaming the gallery amid adults dressed in long dresses and suits, contributed to the variety of flowers on display.

In the back room behind a glass divider, 24 small boxes installed approximately 5 feet from the ground held individual Polaroid photographs of the flowers Pappa captured during her walk.  The use of her camera reveals yet another dichotomy, this time in her material form. While the homemade fabric flowers were a product of cumulative hours of stitching and pasting, the Polaroid illustrates a one-take wonder. “I wanted the aesthetic of the snapshot,” Pappa said. “It’s like a glimpse of what’s happening around.” 

Goudouna also noted the curatorial contrasts between the rooms. “We created this dichotomy between the first space and the second space, where the first space is more physical and you have the direct experience with the flowers, and then you discover the materiality of the flowers,” Goudouna said, referring to the Polaroid perspective in the second space.

The boxes holding the Polaroids were made with medium-density fiberboard (MDF), which Pappa noted was the same engineered wood that most restaurant parklets are made from. Parisian curator and attendee of the gallery Johanna Ouazzani mentioned that the use of the boxes “creates a separate space for the photograph, which I like. But in the meantime, the way that they all hold the same, creates an anomaly between all of them.” In other words, the boxes embolden the individuality of each photo.

Amitav Kaul, a frequenter of The Opening Gallery and friend of Goudouna, noted the importance of this space in the gallery economy of New York City. “There’s not a lot of these pure art spaces. I mean, [Goudouna] runs it almost like a foundation that just helps support interesting artists,” Kaul said. “She’s had a mix of super prominent, really well-established artists, super unknown artists, mediums all over the place. I think the main thing is she just focuses on the art,” he continued.

The Opening Gallery offers an outreached hand to international artists and early-career creators. “When an artist has received the Fulbright scholarship or anything that shows that they are achievers, we want to thank them for that and to promote their career even more,” Goudouna said. “I discovered [Pappa’s] work, and as a Greek artist of her generation, I know she’s one of the very strong voices.”

Pappa’s exhibition was open for two days, yet her choice of muse being public space — steeped in themes of decoration, marketability, distraction, and memory — should be paid attention to.  With a background in photojournalism, Pappa has oscillated between many mediums in her career as an artist. “It took me many, many years to tame what I wanted to bring out as an artist, and that’s happened with experience,” she said. Departing from journalism and landing somewhere between photography and installation, the current events surrounding her life and the life of collective society remain an informant of her work — storytelling has never left Pappa. “My thinking process is to see how everything is connected. So it becomes a story at the end of the day,” she said.