Billy Kidd‘s first solo exhibition, “Transience,” opens tonight at Masters & Pelavin. “Transcience” includes large-format prints of black-and-white, nude female forms among colorful images of dying flowers shot on a black background. “The show explores themes of feminine beauty, desire and its transience. Kidd’s female bodies are soft and lithe, anonymous torsos arranged in reclining and often passionate or subtly erotic poses,” Masters & Pelavin said in a statement. “The bend and sway of the flowers mimics and intensifies the rhythm of the interspersed torsos, the flower an obvious allusion to the female body. But instead of the more languid, youthful beauty of the nudes, the decomposing flowers are like exquisite but fragile older women, their age giving them added texture and power.”

“We grow, cut and display flowers when they are in their ‘prime'”, Kidd tells PDN via e-mail. “Shortly after that we discard and replace them. I intersperse images of the female nude with scratches, goose bumps, and impressions to start a discussion about transience and our definition of beauty.”

“Transcience” opens Thursday, October 24 and runs through December 7, 2013, at Masters & Pelavin in New York City. RSVP for the opening reception this evening from 6 to 8 pm.