State Flower

State Flower at Recycled Propaganda

By D.K. Sole

I was impressed by the challenge these artists took on when they were asked to turn the “state flower” into artworks. A traffic cone is engineered with a purpose: nothing is extraneous about it, the interior and exterior flow together like an ouroboros, the material is also the colour. Anything you do is going to feel like an addition. You can’t improve it or make it more perfectly what it is. It’s a signal, a command (don’t go here, danger!); it makes you wonder (is there a hole in the road?); a source of rage (I wanted to use that lane to turn!), a free object to steal (but then what do you do with it?). It’s the opposite of the things we usually make art on—pale, flat surfaces, waiting to be changed. A viewer sees a pencil drawing on a sheet of paper and reflexively assumes the artist has transcended their material; it’s now something else, like a landscape, or a portrait. A paper-and-canvas artist has to strategize to get us to acknowledge the surface under their marks, a traffic cone artist has the opposite problem.

So this was an exhibition of tactics. A lot of the artists covered the orange with paint, as if they were willing it into a neutral state. They tried to disguise the cone—it was a tiki volcano, a wizard hat, a tractor beam, a banana. I.S.I. Group, the organizer behind the show, uses the word “transform,” but in this cone-rich setting it wasn’t possible for me to have the moment of complacency followed by surprise that makes a transformation really work. (“It’s a volca … hey, wait, it’s a traffic cone!” No.) A single transformed cone in a different context might have worked like that. Maybe a large fantasy diorama with one wizard hat, or a landscape with a solitary mountain? I don’t think anybody played with the implications of the object itself. Or they did and I missed it? I mean, I don’t think they asked us to reflect on the way it makes us think and feel when it’s doing its job. 

(What would that look like? I’ve been talking to people about Heidi Schwegler’s glass work recently, and earlier this year I saw a debut show of glass sculptures by Maccabee Shelley at Reysig and Taylor Contemporary in L.A., so - because I am influenced by those two things - I imagine they could have cast a traffic cone in glass, drawing attention to the strong defiant shape by making it breakable and vulnerable.)

The transformation I liked most was the curatorial presentation in the front room, where I.S.I. Group or Recycled Propaganda had set out a line of construction barrels and run wooden planks through the handles at the top to make a shelf. This barrel shelf ran down the centre of the main room, with further rows of cones suspended along the walls on either side. At one end of the room you had a film projected onto the wall. I don’t know how the entire film went, but the part I watched was made up of handheld footage of road rage incidents. That barrel shelf was the most satisfying sculpture in the show: it looked so natural and ingenious. I could picture the creator pitching themselves towards a goal and feeling pleased when they could see that their object was going to have the effect they wanted.

The artwork that came closest to that directness, in my memory of the show at least, was by an artist whose name I didn’t write down. They ran a black line around their traffic cone, doodling weird eyes and a skull-like mouth in a style that looked as if it came naturally to them. These monster faces showed me how an artist could approach the challenge of making art on a traffic cone with honesty: you acknowledge the shape by flowing around it, finding your way as you go. They were collaborating with the world rather than dominating it. I appreciated their bulging doodle eyes even more after I re-watched I.S.I Group’s promotional video and noticed how gleefully they were describing the artists attacking the cones: “manipulating them, burning them, doing whatever they want.” State Flower shows us the cone escaping from all of those attempts to crush it. Words like “manipulating” and “burning” focus attention on the artists’ contrary longing for sweet-tempered beauty and comedy—in general they’d rather decorate a cone like a porcelain vase, or with cartoon doughnuts, than burn it. (Does cone-as-porcelain do what I was thinking about in the third paragraph: “drawing attention to the strong defiant shape by making it [seem] breakable and vulnerable”? What if ridiculous stupid overloaded prettiness is the tactic I was trying to imagine? Hyperattractiveness, hyperdisguise, ludicrous twee kittens …)

As far as the cover-up approach went, I appreciated the artist named LaRon Emcee, who coated their cone with a painting of a blue cloudy day. I don’t know if they intentionally wanted me to feel the difference between ineffable air and the plastic, but the idea of picking up a meaty, rubbery sky is still with me. 

State Flower at Recycled Propaganda through July 26, 2025
1114 S Main St Suite 120, Las Vegas, NV 89104

Posted and published by Wendy Kveck on July 24, 2025.