LA | Joseph + Melinda Ostraff

_Florilegium_ takes its title from the botanical _florilegium_, an illustrated compendium of plants that flourished in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Part scientific record and part art object, the _florilegium_ was an act of collecting and ordering the natural world. Melinda and Joseph Ostraff take up that tradition in a series of paintings shaped by a visit to The Huntington in San Marino, California, whose gardens exemplify the careful selection, arrangement, and cultivation of plant life found in historic gardens. The work draws on a long lineage in Western garden design, particularly the enduring idea of the garden as a return to Eden: a place of harmony, order, restoration, and beauty, whether understood literally or metaphorically. Botanical forms serve as the artists' conceptual ground, treated not as neutral subjects but as carriers of cultural value, shaped by shifting ideas of use, beauty, and control. Like the gardens that inspired them, these paintings hold a productive tension. They celebrate acts of care, selection, and arrangement while quietly asking what is altered, displaced, or left behind in the process. Having worked side by side for more than forty-four years, the Ostraffs build their paintings through a genuinely shared process, each responding to the other's marks on the surface. Through an expansive range of painterly processes, they push paint as material, resulting in less a blending of two styles than a negotiated visual language in which both voices remain distinct. Melinda holds a Ph.D. with an emphasis in ethnobotany, the study of relationships between people and plants, and works in encaustic and with inks she makes from plants. Joseph, professor emeritus of art at Brigham Young University, has led more than thirty collaborative projects across art, design, music, and dance with partners in England, Ireland, Tonga, New Zealand, and the United States. He is also a three-time recipient of the Utah Artist Fellowship. Together, they were featured in season one of BYUtv's _Artful_ and recently completed a four-week artist residency at the Ballinglen Arts Foundation in Ballycastle, County Mayo, Ireland, followed by a four-week collaborative residency at The Averitt Art Center in Statesboro, Georgia.