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DOCUMENT is pleased to present I want to be an honest man and a good writer, a solo exhibition of new works by Marco Braunschweiler.

The exhibition takes the starting point of the Lilium Oriental Stargazer, developed in Southern California in the 1970s. This selection of photographs and timelapse films of Lilies opening and dying deal with the hybridization of media (and mediums) and the commercialization, packaging and sale of everyday rituals. Initially focused on aesthetic reduction this body of work moved, with time, toward a more nuanced study of creative labor–its commodification and exploitation.

The works on monitors use timelapse photography to speed up the slow stretching and growing lilies make over days into a few short minutes. This intimate experience placidly shows these flowers as dynamic, growing objects. The second set of works is a series of photographs taken from overhead of lilies in the newspapers they were wrapped in, with other ephemera from the studio. The 3 photographs are printed directly onto Plexiglas and attached to the wall using commercial sign brackets. This presentation allows the ink to float on the surface of the Plexiglas and over time eventually fade like the newsprint the flowers are wrapped in.

Marco Braunschweiler (b. 1985) is a Swiss-American artist, curator and lecturer based in Los Angeles. He was the director of Golden Age, Chicago; has presented programs at the Art Institute of Chicago, and White Flag Projects, St. Louis. Braunschweiler has exhibited at the Swiss Institute, New York, the Green Gallery, Milwaukee, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.

An essay by Zachary Kaplan accompanies the exhibition.