In Muskoka Day Lily, Al Freeman continues her ongoing transformation of everyday forms into unexpectedly soft, oversize sculptures. This time, the subject is not a tool or consumer object, but a flower—a Day Lily, native to the Ontario region where Freeman spent childhood summers. Swollen to over six feet tall and constructed in vinyl and polyfil, the sculpture invites viewers into a world where scale, touch, and irony collide.

Known for her plush, deflated renditions of banal objects—a beer can, a Vaseline jar, a hammer—Freeman plays with the aesthetics of comfort and absurdity, often satirizing the coded symbols of masculinity and consumer culture. Here, her choice of a hyper-feminized, decorative bloom becomes a sculptural foil. It’s at once seductive and slightly ridiculous: drooping under its own exaggerated weight, rendered in materials more associated with pool toys than petals.

Like much of Freeman’s work, Muskoka Day Lily toys with visual familiarity and emotional ambivalence. Is it beautiful? Silly? Too much? Not enough? The sculpture turns a flower into a kind of emotional Rorschach—soft, funny, loaded. It asks us to sit with contradiction: fragility and bravado, nostalgia and critique, reverence and ridiculousness.