Imagining how plants grow, 2002, still images from video

Imagining how plants grow, 2002, installation view, When Pigs Fly, Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo, 2005. Photo: Taka Ishii Gallery

Imagining how plants grow

2002, 2 channel video installation, 16mm film transferred to video, 3min loop, mute

Gunnes’s Imagining How Plants Grow I&II (2002) makes the spectators imagine the growth of plants by projecting the process of drawing and erasing the figure of a plant onto the wall screen. The movement of lines appearing and disappearing, in the subtly changing light, indicates the duration of time which the plant takes to grow, while the speeding up of the action and the integration of the separate stages of the process on the screen give the spectator the sense of a great compression of time—-the passage of days and seasonal changes--as in a high-speed film. The generic drawing of a plant, as if taken from an encyclopaedia, with the juxtaposition of its Latin name, attains a metaphorical power because of its semiotic simplicity, evoking, beyond the image of a botanical garden, man’s integration of nature into the structures of civilization.

Excerpt from text, Midori Matsui, Invitation Review – ART, Invitation, Tokyo, Japan

Imagining how plants grow
2002, 2 channel 16mm installation, 3min, mute