Sergio Rojas Chaves has taken his house plants on walks in Victoria. He has taken them for bicycle rides, too.
Now, five of his house plants have become a summer-long exhibition, Plants in Residence, at Open Space gallery on Fort Street.
This is an achievement of no little consequence for Rojas Chaves, 23, an up-and-coming artist who aims to find a career in the art world.
Being something of an art aficionado, I was excited about seeing this plant project. Especially so, since Open Space is an artist-run gallery renowned for its cutting-edge and boundary-pushing shows.
Rojas Chaves agreed to meet me at Open Space and talk me through Plants in Residence. A pleasant fellow, he has just finished a bachelor of fine arts degree at the University of Victoria. On the table where we sat was a small palm plant, which is part of Plants in Residence. Four other plants are scattered throughout the gallery, on people’s desks and so forth.
Rojas Chaves explained Plants in Residence consists of house plants from his home. He bought them at Safeway. Afterward, he took them for walks and bike rides. And now he has transported them to Open Space, where they’ve become Plants in Residence.
The gallery’s website provides an explanation of Plants in Residence. It reads, in part: “Lodging a series of houseplants throughout Open Space, Rojas Chaves will explore distance, displacement and belonging through a focus on house plants.” The blurb continues: “Rojas Chaves has been engaging with house plants since 2014, when he started a series entitled House Plants on Tour.”
House Plants on Tour?
“We would take house plants on bicycle rides around the city,” Rojas Chaves said “We’ve done three bike rides. A couple of times we’ve been down Dallas Road, Ogden Point, all the way to the breakwater.”
As well, Rojas Chaves put house plants in his backpack and walked around the city. There, he would encounter people who wondered what he was up to. It would create “this pause, this distraction in the urban context,” he said.
“It was really interesting,” Rojas Chaves continued. “The reactions were humorous, like: ‘Why are you doing this?’ I would respond accordingly and say: ‘I was just taking my plant out for a walk.’ ”
Open Space staff have named the plants. There are Colin, Dylan, Gene and Florence. And there is the generically monickered Plant No. 1.
Meagan Quigley is a curatorial assistant at Open Space and the person who named Plant No. 1. She said house plants are not on formal display. Rather, they have been “incorporated into our daily life” at the gallery. For instance, one house plant sits on her desk. Another greets visitors at the gallery’s entrance.
“A lot of [Plants in Residence] is based on some very heady conceptual theory around otherness and interconnectivity and co-dependence,” she said.
The co-dependence aspect might be related to watering (plant/human co-dependence). At first, said Quigley, one person was assigned the task of watering all the plants. Now different staffers water Plants in Residence.
“The boundaries kind of disappeared,” she said. “Our plants are being taken care of in different ways.”
Rojas Chaves first got the idea while shopping at Safeway two years ago. He noticed a banana plant being sold as a house plant. This seemed absurd to the artist, whose backyard in Costa Rica was full of banana trees.
“My relationship to them is purely as bush,” he said. “To see one potted and tiny, to me, it was just ridiculous.”
Intrigued, Rojas Chaves bought the Safeway banana plant. He purchased other tropical house plants, too — partly an attempt to replicate his Costa Rican environment in Victoria.
He said the notion behind Plants in Residence is to draw attention to the absurdity of turning outdoor plants into ornamental objects by placing them indoors. By placing them in pots we individualize them. We give them names (as did the Open Space staff), thus “giving them anthropomorphized characteristics.”
As well, Rojas Chaves said, by placing any object into a gallery space, it is immediately viewed as an art object.
This reminds me of the true story of how someone, as a prank, placed a pair of eyeglasses on the floor of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Before long, people were gazing at the objet d’art and snapping photos. I also thought about Marcel Duchamp’s 1917 masterpiece, Fountain, which was a porcelain urinal.
Open Space director Helen Marzolf told me the gallery was “thrilled” when Rojas Chaves approached them about Plants in Residence.
“Really,” I said. “It just seems kind of … unusual.”
“Think so? How so?” she asked.
Well. Perhaps not so unusual, after all.
Open Space encourages you to visit Plants in Residence, which continues at the Open Space gallery, 510 Fort St., to Sept. 17.