"Life & Death"

Robert Petrick’s "Life & Death" is a testament to how masterfully wrought simplicity can convey the most complex and challenging of ideas. Notions that excite and terrify the mind to a certain degree are best expressed through simplicity. Is there anything we return to and dwell on more than life and death? Is there anything that has motivated science, art, religion, and philosophy more than the inescapability of creation and annihilation? We are consumed by the idea and construct of beginnings and ends, not only because considerations of life and death are baked into culture, understandably interesting and worrisome, but perhaps primarily because they confront us at every turn. I am a big fan of flowers. I am attracted to them to a fault when I reflect on how much money and time I spend on them. When your house is filled with flowers, it is filled with death; a living death, a colorful display of life from something that we trick into maintaining a veneer of existence. What a macabre urge to surround ourselves with living death, but how apt a metaphor for the Sisyphean cycle of our time on earth. Perhaps the only way to transcend and delay the inevitable is to enshrine it in art that will last far beyond the limited scope of a lifetime.