If you think about it, a gallery is a lot like a garden. The Willful Plot, curated by Melanie O’Brian at the Belkin Art Gallery, explores how cultural narratives of wilderness and civilization propagate in the site of the garden. Critical queer theorist Sara Ahmed’s articulation of willfulness as a form of anti-authoritarian resistance is at the root of O’Brian’s curation: to be self-willed rather than being full of will, of someone else’s will. Yet the tensions that germinate in the garden—between private and public, cultivation and chaos—occupy the white space of the gallery, too. 

The Belkin is nestled on the north side of the UBC campus, just a few minutes walk from the Pacific Spirit forest. Inside the pristine gallery, it smells like wet dirt, like Stanley Park after a day of rain. Gabi Dao’s original oil blend, antigen, allergen, molecule, wing (2022) wafts from a diffuser set beside the projection of their short film, The Protagonists (2018). The Protagonists overlays Hollywood blockbusters about the Vietnam War atop domestic scenes and archival materials: a hand cutting a succulent frond; a man in a greenhouse; old photographs, blurred and obscured by glass and fluid. In a voiceover, Dao tells us, “Cinema is a cool gel that glosses over my eyes.” Her vision, and ours, is glazed with these histories of violence. In a garden, film reels are unspooled, but smoke fills and clouds the space, like the dirt kicked up by a military helicopter. An animatronic hand—theirs? ours?—tries and fails to cut the fronds. Our cultural programming causes glitches which prohibit us from fully seeing and accessing the radical, domestic, and traditional possibilities represented by the garden; the operations of power do not want us to be wild, to be self-sustaining, to be connected or well. Meanwhile, Dao’s Tear Possibility (2021) collages raise questions about the complicity of the Vancouver Art Gallery; according to Dao’s research, the Rogers family, of Rogers Sugar, was involved in spreading anti-Chinese narratives of pestilence in the early 20th century and also integral to the gallery’s founding. 

Like an overgrown garden, the artists’ multimedia, multi-sensory pieces tend to overlap each other. Dao’s earthy scent follows visitors through the gallery, while the celestial tones and harsh screams of Derek Jarman’s The Garden (1990) are heard before it is seen. Glenn Lewis’s Looking For Paradise (c. 1970-2021) invites a slow, thoughtful passage through photographs and other images that chart the shifts between wildland and the domestic home, paradise fantasies and suburban gardens in contemporary, North American landscaping. Beneath a black and white print of a forest is written, “Wood can be petrified. A forest may be changed from wood to stone”; thick trees then give way to stone arches, classic statuary, and idyllic fountains. (Elsewhere, a man is screaming in fear and pain.) The irony of Lewis’ assemblage is most apparent when we arrive at the demure, immaculate lawn: the saddest paradise possible. But perhaps there’s hope: in a later print, a group of children wander down a path into the dark mouth of a forest. 

Then there’s Lewis’ hand-drawn map of Europe and Asia demarcating, “ROUTE AND GARDEN LOCATIONS.” Does this invite us to see bordered geographies differently, or merely reify them? On the one hand, we might imagine a world mapped by nature rather than cities, by beauty rather than trade routes. On the other hand, gardens have throughout history been cultivated as living representations of national pride. Consider Israel’s “Canada Park,” a national park created through razing Palestinian villages—Imwas, Yalu, and Beit Nuba—and displacing their peoples, as interrogated in Rehab Nazzal’s video of the same name (2015). The park (itself a kind of garden) becomes a tool to naturalise the colonial project, stripping the land of its history, and limning the settlers with a guise of innocence. Like any transplanted, antagonistic, and invasive species, Israel chokes out what came before. Yet, as Nazzal shows in We, the Wild Plants and Fruit Trees (2022), while Israeli signage might try to authorise a colonial history, the Indigenous Palestinian flora stubbornly endures, growing out of the ruins, breathing new futures into the world. 

Ahmed’s archetypal example is the willful child, who must be cultured and nurtured and grown into a person, but who misbehaves and disobeys and acts against the will of her parents. If you think about it, a child is a lot like a garden, is a lot like a gallery. They are messy, obdurate, moulded and mouldering. Ahmed’s willful child refuses to accede to the forces that would straighten her out, get her on track, and “grow her up”. She is not linear. She is not on time. The chronology of The Willful Plot is plant time: Charmian Johnson’s incredibly detailed studies depict irises and onions blooming and shrinking, the stems only barely sketched in, as if to show that growth (and also decay) is never done. Likewise, Nazzal’s resistant greenery refuses to accede to colonial histories, refuses innocence, refuses to live and die by the whims of the state. Of course, while a garden is always young compared to the hand that grew it, the land itself is ancient. And power—the colonial state, always pretending to be the adult in the room—wields time like a weapon. But so can the resistance.   

The queer sociality, or antisociality, of Ahmed’s theory is also alive in The Willful Plot. By antisociality, I mean the refusal of normative social relations, the usual way of things. The potted plants of Dana Qaddah’s photo series Sidani Rooftop (2022) are spread apart at times, while at others they seem to cluster together of their own volition rather than by human design. The tiles of the rooftop are broken and cratered in places; an accompanying text describes “a hidden exterior [...] cracked by decades of root expansion.” In Jarman’s surreal film The Garden (1990), a gay couple is cast as Jesus Christ, persecuted, tortured, and crucified. The colour tinting and near complete lack of dialogue dislocate the film from realist space and time. Yet, the tenderness of the lovers grounds the film in its tragedy—as does the presence of Jarman on screen, tending to his garden, which was a sanctuary to him in his final years after he was diagnosed with HIV. He waters, he cuts, he pots, he prepares the soil, he nurtures and is nurtured, he saves and is saved and is not saved. 

In Mi’kmaw artist Mike MacDonald’s 1993 installation, Secret Garden, sixteen black-box TVs flicker with close-up shots of blooms from one of MacDonald’s renowned butterfly gardens. Sometimes a bee or butterfly will crawl into the heart of a flower to suckle on its nectar; this animal intimacy heightens the impact and contrast to MacDonald’s final shots—a plane spraying insecticide over Vancouver, followed by butterfly collections, pinned and mounted—representing the violence of capital, industrialization, colonialism, and unnecessary death. 

In attempting to carefully untangle all of these threads, like tender vines on a trellis, I am positioning myself as another kind of gardener, the critic figured into the artist/artwork/gallery/curator dynamic. In my research, I stumbled upon what seems to be the installation’s original title, Secret Flowers (1993). I found no record or reason for the change. Critic Robin Laurence wrote in The Georgia Straight that her “urge to name the flowers and plants” prompted a “[realisation] that naming is a form of claiming, a form of colonising.” Yet, descriptions of the plants as Indigenous to BC from critics like Laurence and Scott Watson (Canadian Art) accompany a 1993 press release identifying “rare and endangered plant species, including many used in traditional native medicine” while the Belkin refers only to “threatened traditional medicines.” Per my admittedly untrained eye, there appears to be both Indigenous and non-Indigenous species in the butterfly garden. Is this a pattern of non-Indigenous curators and critics writing over MacDonald’s installation? It’s been thirty years—the record is fragmented. Regardless, I want to be careful not to do the same. 

A garden, like a gallery, like a child, is a gathering place: of people, of ideas, of anxieties, of pasts and presents and futures. It is a sticky stamen, producing pollen, attracting bees. Lest we get too excited about its transformative potential, we must also remember that gardens, like galleries, like children, are sites of intense surveillance. At the end of my tour of the exhibition, I was admiring Derya Akay and Vivienne Bessette’s Freon (2015-ongoing): a communal fridge installation where visitors are invited to “take something leave something” by the placard on the wall. Many have. The fridge is rusting, rotting, covered in magnets and full of old jars, dried plants, crochet fruit, soy sauce packets, mixers, and “milk thistle seeds, gift from S F Ho for HRT garden 2021.” For whatever reason, I happened to look up. Galleries are designed to guide the eye—but sometimes it’s good to look against the grain. Above the fridge, high up on the wall, was a security camera. 

Such collisions between public and private are hyper-naturalised in Vancouver’s cultural landscape. If a garden is a private space subject to a public gaze—with all attendant expectations, but also the radical possibility of untended transformation—then a park is a public space surveilled like a private one. What we now call Stanley Park, for instance, was aggressively colonised through the mid-19th and early 20th century to displace the Squamish people to whom it was home. Now it must be constantly policed to ensure its civility: no coyotes, no cruising, no drinking, no loitering. Meanwhile tent cities pop up in parks across the city: homegrown private space mushrooming on so-called public land. These too must be policed and violated for the so-called public good. For all its incisive questions and its productive tensions, perhaps The Willful Plot could have also looked a bit closer to home. 

The Willful Plot is available for viewing at The Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery until April 16th, 2023. The exhibit is a part of the 2023 Capture Photography Festival Selected Exhibition Program.

Sadie Graham is a writer of essays and fiction with work published in Electric Literature, EVENT Magazine, Room Magazine, Vice, Buzzfeed, and more. You can find her on twitter @westcoastnoir.