PHOTOGRAPHS
Counterculture
Dauwens & Beernaert Gallery, Brussels, 2016
Art Brussels, 2018
Counterculture
Archival inkjet print,
2016
Counterculture appropriates the visual grammar of commercial product photography to stage an aesthetic reversal. The photographs depict wildflowers commonly dismissed as “weeds,” gathered along the banks of the Vltava River in Prague and isolated within a studio setup designed for luxury commodities. Through controlled lighting and compositional precision, plants associated with neglect, transience, and decay are rendered as objects of visual intensity and value.
By subjecting these non-commercial plants to the regimes of advertising aesthetics, the work exposes the ideological mechanisms through which beauty is produced, standardized, and consumed. What is usually framed as excess or waste is momentarily elevated, while the polished artificiality of imported, mass-produced flowers is implicitly questioned. The title
Counterculture references historical movements of refusal and resistance, positioning the work against extractive consumer logics and toward an alternative aesthetic economy grounded in locality, impermanence, and unruly growth. The project treats the weed not as a marginal form of life, but as a visual and political agent capable of unsettling dominant hierarchies of value and taste.