Sieg Gallery – Randi Anderson

Midsommar Crowns

In the 2019 horror film MIDSOMMAR, there is a striking emotional core in which the heroine Dani’s emotional vulnerability is treated as a burden and outright annoyance by her emotionally stunted, indecisive, and indifferent boyfriend, for whom she is no longer fun or useful because of her trauma. In the same way, there are many emotions or inner states that are not acceptable or presentable to society. We want to downplay them because they are not considered proper, useful, or “cool.” For my MIDSOMMAR CROWNS series, I wanted to explore these inner states through portraits of women in particular, although there are certainly plenty of inner states that men are not socially permitted to express. Each woman bears a crown of flowers and other plants with symbolic meaning taken from the language of flowers, especially the Victorian code.