5-50 Gallery is thrilled to present Orchid Fever, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Hayley Youngs exploring the strange and divine realm of nature. Orchid Fever will run from June 14 – July 20, 2025, with an opening reception on Saturday, June 14th, from 4:00 – 7:00 PM.
Youngs creates vibrant, surreal paintings that explore mystical spaces and the human search for harmony within chaos. Inspired by her travels and nature, her work blends landscapes, flowers, and dreamlike forms to transform familiar elements into otherworldly spaces.
Influenced by Surrealism, Psychedelia, and Visionary art, these paintings reflect the universal desire for balance and beauty, serving as a refuge for collective meditation and introspection. Living in the intensity of New York City, she finds painting these immersive worlds both meditative and therapeutic—an escape into color, symmetry, and beauty. Through abstraction and bold, expressive forms, Youngs aims to evoke a sense of wonder, calm, and transcendence.
Interview by Interlocutor Magazine
What are some particular cultural symbolic elements of orchids that you find most compelling, making you want to use them as foundational elements for your artworks?
I’m drawn to orchids’ strange beauty as both a visual escape and a grounding force. In a world that feels chaotic and heavy right now, painting orchids allows me to focus on something intricate, alive, and surreal. It helps me quiet my mind and offers a kind of meditative distraction, while also reconnecting me to nature, something I crave while living in NYC.
In your works for Orchid Fever, how do you render the real forms and colors of orchids into a symbolic language? Is it a primarily intuitive and fluid process?
This series has been a new process and way of working for me. I collect images of orchids, ones I’ve photographed myself, found in books at the library, or sourced from an orchid magazine I subscribe to. I then upload them into Procreate and begin manipulating them: zooming in on certain parts, shifting shapes, and exaggerating the color palette. While I start with real forms, I am trying to move beyond representation, letting the flowers morph into more expressive, symbolic shapes. Through this process, the orchid becomes less of a botanical subject and is transformed into more of a psychedelic space.
How do you think depicting orchids as biomorphic forms rather than strictly realist botanical representations elevates and accentuates them into hypnotic expressions of nature?
I really wanted to show orchids in a way that felt unfamiliar and new. Rather than the static, decorative images we’re used to, these more biomorphic forms invite a more visceral experience that feels exciting and surreal. By altering their shapes and colors beyond realism, I hope to shift how we perceive them, not just as delicate flowers, but as strange, quiet, otherworldly creatures we often forget live among us.
In what ways does Alice in Wonderland directly inspire your practice, especially regarding depicting nature in a surrealist fashion?
I was completely obsessed with Alice in Wonderland as a kid, especially the 1985 made-for-TV live version my parents videotaped for me. I would watch it every day and sometimes multiple times a day. I remember being captivated by how magical it was that Alice stepped into this surreal world filled with bizarre characters and talking flowers. The strangeness was both shocking and vibrant, funny and mysterious. You couldn’t quite tell if it was scary or cool. I think from that, I have always been drawn to the idea of shifting reality and creating dreamlike spaces.
