St. Albert has been called the Botanical Arts City for a few years now but it has never seen botanical arts like this. Calgary watercolour painter and video artist Jennifer Wanner has brought her own personal island of Dr. Moreau’s plants to Perron Street.
Immuto is the name of her two-month art exhibit that shows off several of her unique hybrid designs. She has spent the last few years exploring the philosophy of natural versus manipulated mutation in the plant world. What she has come up with is simultaneously entrancing and terrifying.
“I’m an avid gardener myself,” she admitted, calling herself a “big foody” who loves local, organic food sources.
Still, she understands the world and the new industrialized food chain for a population of seven billion.
“Genetic modification is a big question for us. There are very strong advocates for genetic modification in order to feed this enormous population.”
While large corporations figure out how to develop suicide seeds that self-destruct after single crops, Wanner has delved into her inner fantasy world to go on a voyage of imagination with what she calls “impossible bouquets” of flowers, plants, vegetables and weeds that would make Dr. Frankenstein proud as the rest of the world gasps at the horrific possibilities.
Bear in mind that the finely detailed images herein are still beautiful while they make you cringe. An ear of corn sprouts off of a stalk of precious little flowers. Another organism seems to have two disparate heads and no root system. Her future seems to be populated by creepy creeping vines that could turn against humanity just as swiftly as we have adapted them to our purposes. One wonders whether we are creating better food sources or creating things that will, in turn, use us as primary food sources.
“The work talks about trying to approach it a little bit more carefully and to talk about it. Our relationship with food is that it’s not a commodity; it’s a necessity. It’s something that I think about constantly.”
These images, upon closer inspection, are deeply unsettling but the two videos playing on a loop behind the movable walls provide even more fodder for nightmares. Using stop motion animation, Wanner has given us Florilegium and Herbatrice. These two movies give anthropomorphic qualities to plants with the first showing flowers eating, absorbing, ripping, cannibalizing and assimilating each other while the other shows them dancing around as “edible monsters” as she calls them. They look like stilted characters from old Terry Gilliam animations on the Monty Python show.
Whatever your reaction, Wanner just wants you to start thinking about what’s in your garden and on your plate.
“Everybody comes away from it in different ways. Some people see the beauty in it. I’m trying to get toward the uncanniness of nature and our involvement in nature. It’s finding the familiar within the unfamiliar and that’s when it becomes a little bit frightening.”
Immuto runs at the Art Gallery of St. Albert until April 28. The gallery is located at 19 Perron Street.
For more information, call 780-460-4310 or visit www.artgalleryofstalbert.com.
