These posies pose disturbing questions
Immuto
Where: Art Gallery of St. Albert, 19 Perron Street, St. Albert
When: Until April 28 Info: www.artgalleryofstalbert.com or 780-651-5738
The first thing you will notice entering Immuto, an exhibition of botanical watercolours and two video works at the Art Gallery of St. Albert, is the sublime and meticulous beauty of the paintings. The delicate colours and careful execution of the leaves, petals and roots makes one envision the artist painting with stem in hand to recreate its exact likeness.
A longer gaze, however, reveals something quite different and unexpected; this is not garden-variety vegetation. The elements appear real and authentic, but somehow the whole is askew. Something is not quite right here.
Jennifer Wanner’s exploration into the realm of genetically modified plants has allowed her to create an imaginary world of flora, one that is visually engaging and thought-provoking. Concerns with safety, environmental hazards and a slough of unknowns surrounding genetically modified organisms (GMOS) are freakishly front and centre.
In Immuto, a Latin verb meaning to modify, change or alter, Wanner has created a new order of plant hybrids,
collaging a leaf here and a flower there from genetically modified crops — corn, canola, soy, cotton, tobacco, tomato.
Mingling art, technology, nature and politics (a heady combo indeed), the Calgary artist has sparked some animated conversations among gallery viewers.
“I think the concept is very interesting and it is good for people’s notions to be challenged, in a sense of what art is and what art does,” says exhibition curator, Jenny Willson-mcgrath.
“This exhibition makes us think and ask questions, which contemporary art should do.”
The first watercolour is Florilegium: Brassica rapa, Glycine max, Nicotiana tabacum, Zea
mays, the Latin names for genus and species, defining a composition of canola, soybean, tobacco and corn. This plant, in an anthropomorphized gesture, stands on rootlegs and uses the stem-arm of the yellow canola plant to remove a top-hat of corn husk.
Investing long hours of research, Wanner printed various images, slicing off the elements she wanted. Then, she reconfigured them as a collage and rendered it in watercolour. Each painting displays the same precision and exactness as Old World botanical drawings, but with a contemporary twist that makes the experience very au courant.
The large paintings — roughly three feet by two feet — each took four to five months to complete. Wanner controls the paint with a steady, confident hand, every brush stroke adding scrupulous detail.
Florilegium: Brassica rapa, Glycine max, Gossypium hirsutum (sine terra) floats like a balloon, dangling a soybean pod, and cotton balls opening among the canola flowers. But where are the roots? Apparently, this New World organism does not need soil or roots to flourish. Another genetic success?
Watching Wanner’s stop animation videos — Florilegium (Latin for a gathering of flowers) and Herbacentrice (from the words herbaceous and cockentrice, a dish made by combining a pig and capon for medieval feasts) — probes the mind as we watch this secret world of plants unfold its dark secrets. What are we creating? What are we eating? Do we understand the consequences?
These engineered creations demonstrate human behaviour and qualities in the video as they interact with each other. They inhale with expanding stems, and exhale. Sometimes they cannibalize each other and grow alarmingly quickly and spontaneously.
Fascinating stuff indeed, and unsettling.
Science and nature eloquently collide in Wanner’s world and make one seriously question the relentless human desire to dominate nature, nonchalantly toying with DNA to manipulate the natural world.
“This idea evolved over time, with research and reading,” says Wanner, “and from my love for gardening and interest in what we eat.
“I am very much an organic, local grower/supporter in the way I conduct my own life, but I like my work to talk about the bigger issue of all of it, rather than it being didactic.”
Wanner says she wants her work to stimulate viewers to think about organics and GMO foods, and how the Earth is going to feed seven billion people.