With its current exhibition, Arvo Leo’s The Orchids / Had the Look of Flowers That Are Looked At, speaking to plant domestication, the Nanaimo Art Gallery is holding a pair of florally focused functions in the outdoors.
The two outings, under the name The Surroundings, include a poetry walk at Buttertubs Marsh on July 8 and a film screening of Little Shop of Horrors, a 1960 creature feature starring an insatiable man-eating plant, at Bowen Park on July 20.
“For the most part you think of an orchid in, like, a greenhouse and they’re super-domesticated and ‘hard to care for’ … but there’s also beautiful forests that we are surrounded by, so we wanted to take it back into that,” gallery curatorial intern Emma Sise said of the decision to organize outdoor events.
Sise spent last month collecting submissions for the Open Bulrush Poetry Reading. The entries were required to adhere to the related topic of environment, landscape, plant life and one’s connection to the natural world.
She said poems can say a lot in a short period of time.
“We just asked that they be about plants or flowers or trees or forests and your relationship to them and how when you walk through a forest, what are you thinking about? What are you thinking the plants are thinking about?” Sise said.
Sise added that the reading takes the gallery’s current theme “How can we speak differently?” literally, as community members, not just “artist-artists” were welcome to share their creative interpretations.
The event starts and ends at the Miner’s Cottage, with the participants wandering around the loop of the marsh. There will be around 10 poets, including busker Tim Lander and inaugural Nanaimo poet laureate Naomi Beth Wakan, making a rare post-retirement appearance. Wakan will recite a piece commissioned by the gallery for a past exhibition. Sise said the poems are all different; one is written about Buttertubs specifically, while another is composed of anecdotes about favourite plants, for example.
“I think people in Nanaimo have a really unique perspective on the spaces they inhabit because British Columbia is so beautiful and we live on this Island and there are so many different types of landscapes,” Sise said.
She said she hopes the event encourages people to think a little bit more about the environment and the way they react and interact with it, and that “people will think more about the fantasticness that is biological life, and that art is a really beautiful way of exploring those things.”
WHAT’S ON … Open Bulrush Poetry Reading at Buttertubs Marsh Sunday, July 8 from 1 to 3 p.m., starting at the Miner’s Cottage. Little Shop of Horrors screening at Bowen Park (at Millstone River just West of Wall Street) on Friday, July 20 at 8 p.m.
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