Rama Rota y Cuna Frivola (Broken Boughs & Frond Cradles) is a Flora Aura painting, abstracted and withdrawn from Thomas Eakins' Portrait of Dr. Samuel D. Gross (The Gross Clinic) 1875, wherein a white, stately figure is dramatically operating on a grotesque victim in front of an audience of onlookers within a darkened panopticon surgical theatre.Translating the grotesque history of Thomas Jefferson University's surgical theatre, the work offers a macabre abstraction of the institutional practice of using formerly enslaved cadavers for medical instruction.

Bloodied Pollock drips curl into cinnamon colored paint casts of desiccated Eureka palm leaves on the soft, velvet painting's surface. Acrylic and latex paint curve into boughs of frond fingers, encrusting the powder pink surface in a conflicting color vibration of grotesque anthropometry and vibrant, fecund foliage.

Flora Aura cast landscape paintings considers fertility culture across reproductive and climate crisis in the Americas: a complicated historical, political, and geographic context wherein conquering the tropical landscape and diasporic women’s bodies stem from a colonial Eurocentric legacy.

The painting is part of an immersive installation of Coralina Rodriguez Meyer solo show at Thomas Jefferson University Helix Gallery Iris Crepusculas y Pupilas Madrugadas on view November 15 - December 13 2024.

Portrait of Dr. Samuel D. Gross (The Gross Clinic)
1875 Thomas Eakins (American, 1844–1916)
https://philamuseum.org/collection/object/299524