Art in Montreal

Jessica Eaton ’s Mariphasa lupine lumina at Bradley-Ertaskiran takes its title from the imaginary flower central to the old horror movie Werewolf Of London (Stuart Walker, 1935). In the film, a British botanist travels to Tibet to find the rare flower which only blooms by moonlight. Blooming is also equated with the botanist becoming a werewolf. Murder (especially of what one loves) is the only means to avoid full “transvection.” The flower is thought to be the only antidote for those who suffer from lycanthropy, a disease that makes one neither man nor wolf but some demonic creature, described as “the grotesquely familiar.” 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