Taylor William McKimens presents Flower Market, a month-long, evolving, site-specific installation of small sculptures of scrappy desert flora at Free Parking Space. The exhibition marks McKimens’ first solo project centered primarily on sculpture, as well as his return to Southern California after years in New York. Drawing from the Los Angeles Wholesale Flower Market directly across the street, the exhibition incorporates visual cues from its blue-collar improvised displays, spills, and clutter, entangling them with the high-end display conventions of the contemporary art gallery.

The artworks in Flower Market tap into his California desert upbringing and depict plants that have endured a hard ride. Each is transplanted into cast-off containers such as dented cans, discarded bottles, cups, broken pots, boxes, jugs, and shoes. Many are marked with bootleg pop imagery and off-brand logos, and are littered with pop detritus that both clashes with, and heightens the plants’ enduring natural dignity. They quietly evoke narratives of tattered pride, casual neglect and punishing California heatwaves, but these plants and flowers don’t seek pity. They stand tall as representatives of the infinite beauty and power of nature to persist and grow through adversity. They’re plainspoken, lighthearted and unabashedly human. They’re sculptural folk songs about contemporary American life.