The 16 mm film Imagining How Plants Grow, I+II is about representation in the setting of a botanical garden. The sign, that follows the whole lifecyclus of a plant, becomes the constant element but still its function changes from representing the whole species into representing a tombstone for a specific plant.
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.
Midori Matsui, excerpt from Invitation Review – ART, Invitation, Tokyo, Japan
Imagining How Plants Grow
2002,installation constisting of two 16mm film transferred to dvd (each film is 3 min), double projection and set of two drawings 110x75cm
Imagining how plants grow, 2002, filmstill
Imagining how plants grow, 2002
When Pigs Fly, (with Christine Rebet), 2005
Courtesy of Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo.
Imagining how plants grow, 2002
Courtesy of Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo.
Imagining how plants grow, 2002, filmstills
