A Rose Is Still A Flower unearths Elana’s relationship with her mother—an evolving exchange of lessons, lineage, and mirrored histories. The series consists of photographs from different phases of their life. These portraits takes alongside their lived trials, tribulations, and developing spiritual worldviews. The digitally painted portraits lend the work a dream-like, pop-inflected, and quietly haunting quality, collapsing memory with imagination. At its core, the project is Elana’s attempt to contemplate memory itself—and how to preserve what time tries to unmake. Understanding fully that the time she has left with her mother is limited.
With shorthand text provided by her mother, Eloise Molock, the work becomes a true collaboration. A language once used to limit her abilities become a language of liberation, authorship, and record. Eloise’s notations hold musings, reflections, and fragments of lived experience. And only a chosen few can decipher what remains unspoken, what is deliberately held close.
The title, comes from the Aretha Franklin song, “A Rose Is Still A Rose” and a nod to the alter-ego, my mother has she refers to as Rose.