The Martlet

WHAT: “Down the Garden Path” and “The Lab 10.3”
WHERE: The Art Gallery of Greater Victoria
WHEN: Feb. 18 – June 5 and Jan. 28 to April 10, respectively
HOW MUCH: Free with a rented pass from the Greater Victoria Public Library or by donation on the first Tuesday of every month; otherwise, $11 for students.

“Down the Garden Path.” It could be the name of a gardening store, a subsidiary of the Dig This chain. As a title for an art show, it conjures innocuous watercolours and the sketches of amateur botanists. But the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria’s (AGGV) show, with works from Mark Lewis, Scott McFarland and Yedda Morrison, is as much a trip down the rabbit hole as down the garden path.

There’s a dark burrowing into artificiality that’s as mad as any hatter’s tea party in this exhibit. Indeed, a tea party would be well-suited to the environs of Yedda Morrison’s parlour installation. A “Please do not sit on the furniture” sign was added after what one can only assume was a spate of brazen sitting incidents. Were it not for this plea, the parlour, comprised of a settee and two Louis XVI chairs, striped and floral-printed wallpaper on one wall and three framed pictures, might entice the viewer to pour a cuppa and eat crustless sandwiches.

But the fabric on the gilded neoclassic furniture doesn’t quite fit — it’s too new, the finish too matte, and the print looks like an inscrutable hybrid of mathematical symbols and art nouveau flowers. In fact, the print is Bodoni Ornament font that spells out articles from the Kyoto Protocol. That settee that looks like the domain of stodgy old matrons? It’s actually “Article 2 (in Carbon).”

Yedda writes that she “imagines a future without access to ‘real flora,’” where “leaf has been reduced to motif, plant to pattern and nature to interior decor.”

The perfectly ordered vertical rows of flowers and their mirror images that march along the one wallpapered wall are 17 endangered species from New York’s once-abundant flora. “Extinction Parlour (in Island Fox)” is accompanied by a list of the flowers represented, and reminds viewers that the common nomenclature of the botanical world is a dark legacy of colonization: Seaside Goldenrod evokes the sceptre of imperialism; Small White Lady’s Slipper, the privileging of race.

McFarland’s photographs haunt with static images of humans in hyper-constructed gardens. Each is composed of several images reworked and superimposed with a lightness of touch that belies their composite nature. Again, titles are key: words like “spraying,” “inspecting” and “trapping” turn the day-to-day duties of gardeners into acts of aggression. The final photo in the series shows a maroon-haired aging dame, dressed in baby blue, with matching eyeshadow caked into the creases of her eyelids. She smells a single flower while she strolls, and her partner skulks behind. Her attention to garish grooming (very Elizabeth Taylor, the later years) is a perfect counterpoint to the saturated colours of the meticulously tended garden. The image is more eerie than idyllic; her face is stony, her environment pruned into submission. This is not nature. It is oppression beneath the false brightness of the botanically banal.

Lewis projects a split video of a thoroughfare in a park in Vienna. Pedestrian traffic moves through at dawn (left side of the projection) and dusk (right side). Joggers and strollers and the odd horse-drawn carriage approach or recede — it seems inane until you realize that everything takes eons to navigate the path. It’s like one of those nightmares in which you try to run, but find the air has turned viscous and impossible to move through.

The “garden path” is not an easy one to tread.

Tucked just off of it, Tegan Forbes’s installation (“The Lab 10.3”) feels like a startling non sequitur when first entered. Taxidermied rabbits’ feet hang from the walls instead of floral wallpaper. The feet are keychains — talismans for some, tasteless savagery for others. A large black rabbit silhouette has been painted onto one wall and index cards with words and phrases like “Vermin,” “Spaying” and “With mashed potatoes” are tacked over it (compiled from articles about UVic’s polarizing rabbit issue). A comment book features “Gordon the prehensile lagomorph,” a chain-smoking rabbit transplanted to Texas. The allure of a readily available permanent marker has inspired viewers to scrawl other remarks and tack them to the walls, including “Cause to paws” and “Not so lucky.” The damage rabbits caused to UVic’s grounds and gardens was one oft-cited reason for their removal; in this sense, Forbes’s Lab pairs well with “Down the Garden Path.”

It’s also a literal, logical destination for a trip down a steadily darkening rabbit hole.