Arvo Leo

2018 16 minutes Soundtrack by Paolo Thorsen-Nagel ------------------------------------------ Watching plants move (excerpt) by Ana María Gómez López In 1880, Charles Darwin published his final book The Power of Movement in Plants, where he described several methods for documenting plant behavior imperceptible to human observation. In one instance, Darwin placed a small ball of wax on a needle fixed to the leaf of a plant. Examining the shadow of the wax ball on a reference card beneath the needle, Darwin traced the plant’s subtle movement throughout the day on a pane of glass, noting the ball’s position at ten to fifteen minute intervals. The resulting diagram of circumnutation—autonomous movements of leaves, roots, and other elements, often following circular, elliptical, or irregular patterns—were the first “time-lapse” recordings of plant activity, similar in intention to the motion studies by Étienne-Jules Marey. Less than two decades later, Darwin’s studies would be confirmed by subsequent experiments in early cinematography in carried out by Wilhelm Pfeffer, Henderina Victoria Scott, and Lucien Bull, among others. Arvo Leo’s The Orchids/ Had the Look of Flowers That are Looked At invokes these early mechanical reproductions of plant behavior. Viewers witness multiple orchid flowers blooming lavishly in time-lapse cinematography, each more sumptuous than the last. More distinctly however, Leo’s work brings this genre together with contemporary considerations on plant sentience: the capacity of plants to communicate, process information, and hold memories. Bursting flower buds intersect with stop-motion sequences of choreographic orchid formations, where plants perform collaborative, self-directed activities in the artist’s studio. One such activity is photography itself, albeit without a camera: orchids arrest their own kinetic phenomena in cyanotype impressions, forming portraits of themselves wielding human-made tools, the artist’s belongings, and other paraphernalia. Plants move, both independently and by way of the artist; image-making results from this movement in the artist’s workspace. In line with Michael Marder’s suggestion of “the artistry of plants that make themselves,” Leo presents orchids as creative collaborators, capable of producing not only the visually sensuous qualities of their flowers but the very technological artifacts that humans use to record them. Yet what is implied when orchids render their own image without the use of a human camera in order to make “plant self-portraits?” In writing about camera-less photography for an exhibition catalog on Anna Atkins, Carol Armstrong reminds the reader that “the ‘original’ camera was not a machine at all, but nature herself.” Citing photographer and writer Robert Hirsch, she retells Aristotle’s observations of a partial eclipse, where light projections made by small openings between the leaves of a tree produced crescent-shaped images of the sun on the ground. Photography’s origins are rendered arboreal: “the shutter was not a metal mechanism in a box but a cluster of leaves” and “the recording surface was the ground of the earth.” It is this botanical accent that frames the work of 19th century photographers such as William Henry Fox Talbot, John Herschel, and Anna Atkins. For them, the human hand played no role in the pictorial potential of pre-camera photography. At a time when photography was still not defined as a lens-based medium, plant specimens—a favorite subject for photogenic drawings, salted paper prints, and cyanotypes alike—materialized art created through natural processes with a piece of nature. “Botanographs,” as these were occasionally called, made patent the structural alignment between photosynthesis on the one hand and the emergent medium’s reliance of light capture on the other. As Armstrong writes, this early photography, characterized by eccentric experimentalism rather than commercial manufacture, constituted “a long-standing drive to botanicize the imagery of the mind in its effort to mark the meeting between light, leaf, and ground as the material and the birthplace of an organic (optical and luminous, chemical and botanical) imagination.”