"At the time I started this new body of work, I was getting into the idea of flowers on graves," Sage Vaughn told Juxtapoz in his cover story back in February 2015. "This idea of mortality. I've been doing a lot of paintings on the subject of vanitas, which is an old still life. The works usually would have a skull or flowers in them, all these Flemish paintings in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries about the fragility of life. I really love it, and in my research, I started to do really expressive skull paintings, almost one a day."
Several calendar years later finds the Los Angeles-based artist expanding on those early permutations of the flower works, as he forms new structures and near-portrait like compositions. Vaughn has explored themes of revival and metamorphosis throughout his career, from butterfly circles to recycled images in his collage. Mortality, survival, and regrowth are in all of these works. 
Unit London notes that Come Together, Far Away, Vaughn's newest show on view through July 6, 2019, "... portrays various characters who epitomize the theme of survival. As the artifacts of his labor, the topiary-like figures simultaneously act as landscapes and portraits. By replacing any the identifiable features of his subjects with flora and fauna, Vaughn's pieces decompose the societal elements and pose the question: what will survive? Many interpretations of survival are illustrated within Vaughn's specimens: the Rodeo Clown whose job it is to purely survive the charges of a raging bull, women who've escaped various genocides and civil unrest in the Congo and the bones of Joseph Merrick."
