FLESH INTO BLOOM @ CULT Aimee Friberg

CULT Aimee Friberg is pleased to present Flesh into Bloom, featuring work by Daniela Terroba, Theresa Daddezio, Ruxue Zhang, and Abby St. Claire. Opening May 21 and running through July 11, the exhibition brings together artists whose practices engage the botanical and the body, exploring transformation as a material condition and perceptual experience. The gallery will host an opening reception on Thursday, May 21, from 5–7 PM.

In this grouping of works, flesh is the seed, the root, the stem, the thorn, and the flower. We all bloom and decay with time as our witness. Across the exhibition, the female form and floral matter emerge as porous sites of investigation rather than fixed entities, where interior and exterior, structure and dissolution, sensation and memory remain in constant exchange. Forms swell, rupture, and recede. Boundaries become fluid, malleable, fertile. Surfaces hold traces of pressure, time, and touch, imprinting memory and documenting cycles. Organic and synthetic elements intermingle, complicating distinctions between the natural and the constructed. The works invite consideration of an ecosystem both created and earthly, unfolding to encompass multiple states of being. Rather than presenting the body as singular or contained, the exhibition approaches it as a shifting field that expands into landscape, collapses into texture, and registers both the intimacy of lived experience and the vastness of biological and psychological processes. In this space, bloom is not only a moment of flowering but a state of becoming, where growth and decay, beauty and unease are held in tension.

Daniela Terroba (Mexico City) has immersed herself in the theme of the body, exploring the image as a flexible organ. Moving through tissues, membranes, and organs, she works through an associative process that traces connections between the fetus, the uterus, the cave, the spiral, the shell, the egg, and the vagina. These forms surface across her practice, which encompasses drawing, painting, ceramic-framed works, and sculpture. Her compositions evoke interior bodily spaces while resisting fixed representation, unfolding as sensorial environments where forms remain in flux, shifting between the intimate and the expansive.

Theresa Daddezio (New York) uses the metaphor of the body as a container to explore consciousness, fragility, and sexuality through a painterly language rooted in abstraction. Working through an embodied sense of time and place, she creates optical undulations of flatness and depth, vibrancy and restraint. Within compressed visual fields, forms hover at the edge of recognition, suggesting flora, vessels, and earthen strata, while earth-toned palettes intermingle with synthetic color. Through these spatial and chromatic tensions, Daddezio constructs a psychological site where sensual experience and memory remain entangled.

Ruxue Zhang (San Francisco) examines perception as a shifting condition, focusing on the space between the viewer and what is seen. Working in unique multiples, she renders closely related scenes across subtle variations, moments that unfold through repetition, distance, and time. Her paintings juxtapose everyday imagery with elements that feel unrecognizable or cosmological, destabilizing fixed points of reference and inviting a slower mode of looking. Through this accumulation, Zhang reflects on how perception is shaped by memory, mediation, and the act of observation itself.

Abby St. Claire (San Francisco) is a floral artist specializing in botanical installations and event environments. Her large-scale, site-specific sculptures engage the botanical as both emergence and excess. Across her practice, she explores the temporality of beauty and the inevitability of transformation, where abundance and impermanence coexist.