Bo Dennis has been a farmer for 16 years, and when he was younger, he swore he would never grow flowers. According to his thinking at the time, they were frilly and unnecessary and seemed to be a waste of time and resources.
But some years later, Dennis realized he had room to grow and tend to flowers, and they’ve since become a major part of his livelihood at Dandy Ram Farm in Monroe, where he is farm director and lead designer. The farm, which is growing in popularity, specializes in making sustainably grown wedding arrangements.
Now, Dennis has joined 21 other artists who have contributed pieces to a Belfast exhibit that’s all about the idea that people can think a certain way about something, realize they were mistaken, and change.
The free exhibit, called “I’ve Been Wrong Before,” is running now through the end of November at Waterfall Arts. The contributors work in a variety of media, including painting, photography, sculpture, poetry and dance.
The exhibit is meant to explore the gradual change in ideas that’s part of the artistic process, and that can ultimately help produce works that are totally different from what a creator had originally intended.
Organizers of the exhibit selected works that either reconsidered an idea or repeated it in different ways, or were from an artist who had taken a break from the idea and returned to it later on, according to curator Annika Earley.
“The creative process is always so much about revision, and everything is always very finished in the gallery setting,” Earley said. “This work is all about showing some of that [creative process]. It’s like how, when you do a math problem, you show your work, so I’m interested in work that makes a little bit of that visible.”
In Dennis’ case, his contribution is a sculptural floral arrangement that reflects the change he went through in his own life to overcome his opposition to flowers and become a successful producer of them.
Other works in the exhibit get at the idea of being “wrong before” in different ways.
Two graphite drawings by Taryn Pizza demonstrate the artist’s personal growth by including different renderings of the same house. The first, dated 1997 and titled “no lines are solid,” features the crooked lines and lopsided final product a child might make. The second, dated 2024 and titled “no lines were solid I,” looks as though it was done by a more competent and experienced artist.
Kathryn Shagas contributed a collage made up of prior artworks of hers that she cut up and re-assembled.
A photography piece from Abigale Avey features overlaid images that bleed into each other — the result of what Earley described as a happy accident.
“She took a trip and she took what she thought was a fresh roll of film, but it actually had been used. She’d already shot it, so she did these accidental double exposures that ended up being really interesting images,” Earley said.
Beyond the visual arts, the exhibit also includes less conventional types of work, such as poems from Belfast Poet Laureate Maya Stein that were made out of words from a rejection letter that she received after submitting one of her works for a review in Publisher’s Weekly.
“When you read a fortune cookie and you’re thinking about what it might mean, even though it’s a very generic message, you have to look at it [and apply it] more personally and think about what it might mean,” Stein said. “I have to reread those lines and see if they would work together in a poem. They can work that way, too, I suppose. But personally, I thought of them more as little fortune cookies for myself.”
Poets Stein and Catie Joyce-Bulay will read their work at an event on the afternoon of Nov. 23, in which another participant in the exhibit, Caroline Routh, will be giving a dance performance. Until then, Routh’s contribution is represented at Waterfall Arts by a costume and prop.
Earley was pleasantly surprised by the less conventional submissions to the show and in learning about some artists’ histories changing.
“Just this idea that because the artistic process is always in flux, there are moments where you can think about, ‘oh, this actually isn’t working; I need to change this dramatically,’” Earley said. “Not every piece is a direct illustration of the title, but we’re exploring this idea of revision, revisitation, and reordering an image.”
