Botanical Visions: The Art of MF Cardamone

This monograph highlights the art of MF Cardamone, which carries on the classic tradition of botanical art with an eclectic mingling of contemporary elements through mixed media collage. At times the artist incorporates actual specimens from the field along with her own artistic creations and scraps of material. She appropriates the look of botanical art while adding mystical and cultural interpretation. For example, her piece Franklinia with Cloak (2010) depicts the image of a bronzed leaf from the rare Franklinia tree rising out of the vintage image of the 18th-century cloak of Benjamin Franklin, for whom the tree is named. At points it is difficult to decipher which elements of the larger piece are artistic renderings and which are part of the cut-and-paste collage. The strength of the work is the artist “inflecting her observations with jarring juxtapositions, humorous musing, and sly irony,” as Sasse, the chief curator at the Tucson Museum of Art in Arizona, keenly notes in her essay. The book conjures curiosity and will educate and surprise even the most casual reader. 100 color illus. (Mar.)