Artwork Information

Yvonne Todd's impossibly perfect, dewy rose recalls Hallmark cards, designed to facilitate off-the-rack emotional response. Her big photo suggests amplified sentimentality: intimacy and tenderness WRIT LARGE. The classy egg-shaped vignette hints at fertility and pregnant pauses. The rose could be a marker of love or death. Either way this highly visually and culturally processed sign attests to the conventionalised forms our feelings take. Does Chlora recuperate kitsch? Is it sincere, a piss-take, or a bit of both? Perhaps it points

to something real at stake in the cliché. (Snake Oil, 2005)