Flowers are such a common subject in photography and painting that it is to some extent surprising that artists still find it engaging. Yet as the history of art clearly shows, creative minds always find inventive and valid ways of utilizing even the most tired subjects, and perhaps flowers, with their underlying symbolism of beauty, re-birth, and transience, are as timeless a subject as there is.

Wallflowers) takes a sideways look at flowers as subject matter and explores some of the many ways in which a floral motif can subtly engage, inform, or subvert an image. Ranging chronologically from Julia Margaret Cameron’s 1872 portrait of Alice Liddell posed in front of a flowering vine to Ryan McGinness’ 2006 multi-layered silkscreen; the works in _Wallflowers come at flowers in different and often surprising ways.

Adam Fuss creates a ghostly life-size photogram by floating a floral embroidered Chloe tunic on black and white paper. Cal Lane uses a blowtorch to turn heavy objects like wheelbarrows and shovels into delicate floral filigree. Cecil Beaton whimsically dresses up C.Z. Guest in a floral headdress, while Laurel Nakadate tosses her flower-patterned underwear off a train to make a two-dimensional performance piece.

Seydou Keita photographs three girls, all wearing dresses of the same floral pattern. Jack Pierson creates a large-scale collage with broken repetition of images and letters spelling out the word “roses”. Sandra Bermudez creates a stunning pastiche of a Gucci flower pattern out of sunglasses, and Annie Leibovitz goes deep into the forest to pose Marc Jacobs as the caterpillar and Natalia Vodianova as Alice in a previously un-shown picture from her “Alice” series.

Heidi McFall drops branches of flowers into the background of one of her masterful pastel portraits to provide an emotional context for her subject. And lastly, both Katharine Wolkoff and a group of images from MAGNUM show the inescapable presence of flowers in the world as they appear sometimes intentionally, but often incongruously, in the documentary image.