The Willful Plot

The Willful Plot brings together artists’ practices to expand the notion of the garden as a site of tension between wild and cultivated, temporal and perpetual, public and private, sovereign and colonized. Here, the garden is considered not only as a delineated patch of earth, but as a story to complicate the way in which cultures and individuals see themselves in relation to ecology, sociality, belief and possibility. It is an opportunity to look at human relationships with land, flora, fauna and their interrelatedness. In its willfulness, the resistance garden is a counter-site, a heterotopia for alternative cultivation and potential transformation. The complexities of resistance and “…willfulness as audacity, willfulness as standing against, willfulness as creativity” (borrowing from scholar Sara Ahmed’s thinking in Willful Subjects) are articulated through works that use the garden as a site of cultural defiance and reclamation. If the garden is a site and a practice analogous to the studio, it exists within and beyond the logics of human time, holding its own agency, yielding non-linear narratives that give and take, fruit and compost, persist and disappear. The Willful Plot is curated by Melanie O’Brian and made possible with the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and our Belkin Curator’s Forum members.

The Willful Plot includes works from Derya Akay and Vivienne Bessette, Gabi Dao, Derek Jarman, Charmian Johnson, Glenn Lewis, Mike MacDonald, Rehab Nazzal, and Dana Qaddah.