Abstract
Protest Flowers reimagines the language of ecofeminism to meet the complex urgencies of this moment, transforming cast sunflowers into kinetic, robotic sculptures that oscillate between humor and grief, action and stillness. Tory Fair’s sculptural work draws from an evolving ecofeminist ethos, one that questions extractive systems while embracing interdependence, care, and embodied knowledge. Her ongoing engagement with the histories of feminist abstraction—particularly through her research on Susan L. Stoops’ landmark 1996 exhibition More than Minimal: Feminism and Abstraction in the 70s at the Rose Art Museum—grounds her practice in a rich lineage of artists such as Mary Miss, whose work blurs the boundaries between architecture, land art, and ecological intervention.
Fair’s sunflowers, cast in silicone rubber and embedded with dirt at the end of their life cycle, embody both resilience and contradiction: they protest their own artificial materiality while insisting on the beauty and absurdity of endurance. These sculptural forms do not settle—they sway, teeter, roll, and tremble. In their mechanical movement, they mourn, they jest, and they offer an elegiac yet buoyant response to the precarious state of the world. The installation takes over ODD-KIN with towering 10-foot flower patches, clusters of animated blooms, and remote-controlled “support flowers” that viewers are invited to walk with—transforming the space into a surreal and tender field of motion, resistance, and entanglement.
Kate McNamara, founder of ODD-KIN