Mini Solo Exhibition: Heather Monks
Following her award recognition at the J-Collabo 6th Annual Exhibition in 2024, Heather Monks presented a solo exhibition at the café gallery space of Brooklyn Beauty/Fashion Labo, held from March 1 to 31, 2025. The show featured a selection of photographic works that investigate the fragile impermanence of the natural world through a uniquely intimate and meditative lens.

Monks' practice centers around freezing flowers in blocks of ice and capturing them through photography. This process—both preservative and destructive—suspends the subject outside of time. The flower’s outward beauty is preserved, but its living cells are pierced by ice crystals, its scent drowned, and its vibrancy slowly lost as it begins to thaw. Through this paradox, Monks reveals how even acts of preservation can contain the seeds of transformation and loss.

Her work prompts viewers to reflect on our instinctive desire to hold on to fleeting beauty, both in nature and within ourselves. By abstracting these moments of suspended decay, Monks poses critical questions about our relationship with the natural world: Is our need to preserve beauty actually a form of control? Are we, in our attempts to protect, also complicit in slow destruction?

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