The film is littered with references to the collapse of distinctions between the plant and animal kingdom, the erosion of sleep and waking states, and the world as a carnivorous zoo. Much of its first third concerns the botanist deploying all manner of lights on the plant, Charles J. Stumar’s cinematography giving the whole thing a mysterious silvery glow.
It is less directly the horror film than the nature morte or still life that Eaton’s work references in this exhibition, something of a break from the references to the history of non-objective painting in her earlier work.
Altogether, these works are thankfully quite far from the unconvincing vitalism that tends to be appealed to in the “botanical turn” that was clogging up galleries recently like tree roots grown into plumbing.
Here, nature is quite dead, and whatever vital powers it may have possessed are tricks, not only on the illusion of said vitality but on the way humans perceive, creating images so intensified that they can’t correlate comfortably to the phenomenal world. It is in this respect that they take on the possibly horrifying qualities of “the grotesquely familiar.”
No one in the gallery, I noticed, seemed very unsettled by this. They did seem quite entranced by its technicality, getting lost in the many attractive details that make up the images.
There is something “Victorian” about it all, both as a peculiarly artificial presentation of “death” and as a great performance of technical prowess. And with that, there is also something of that haunted idea of photography that was circulating then, only to eventually find its way (very differently) into Pictorialism and Surrealism.
Eaton’s work does look superficially familiar, with shades of Surrealist solarization, collage, or Jack Chambers’ Silver Paintings. However, what she’s doing is somewhat different, certainly on a technical level.
The black and white works have an entirely different presence from those in colour, reading far more as collage, and having an exaggerated sense of retro glamour to them to the point that they seem more like advertising. The gimmickry connected to them adds to this. At the front desk, you can get 3D glasses to look at some of the prints. One of the women in the gallery tried briefly, but almost everyone else I observed eschewed them.
The flowers are depicted sitting in vases on little plinths or tables, all of which are rendered in a flat, “painted” way that contrasts with the heightened surface quality of the photographs. Relying on techniques that provide a bas-relief quality that makes the image registration low, Eaton contrasts this with the type of flat, hyper-textural rendering of the surface of petals that is more commonly found in scanographs.
The softened colours from a distance suggest Victorian-era prints or wallpaper panels, but up close possess the unique quality of photographed paint, offering an additional layer of heightened visual deceptiveness.
This play of heightening is matched by the generally stunted quality that the works have, never fully becoming one thing or the other but taking what from a distance is an abstractly comprehensible image and cracking it into shards with proximity and duration.