Magical Mushrooms

Artists explore the wood-wide web on the forest floor.

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With an array of the weird and the wonderful – from paintings made with “spore pigment” to a wall so pinioned with bracket fungi that one may hanker for a climbing rope – mushrooms and their fungal cousins may never have been quite so magical, at least within an art gallery. Many works in the large group show, Symbiosis, on view until Oct. 29 at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, are inspired by new scientific discoveries, and age-old Indigenous wisdom, about the vital role fungi play in forest ecosystems.

Symbiosis is a biological term that refers to mutually beneficial relationships between different types of organisms. Here, it relates specifically to fungi, which include everything from yeasts and moulds to mushrooms. Not only do they help other species by breaking down vegetative matter so nutrients can be reabsorbed by  plants, but their long fungal strands, known as mycelia, can act like an underground plumbing system, moving nutrients around, a phenomenon that has been dubbed the “wood-wide web.”

The show’s potential to promote public awareness is important in an era of environmental crisis, as healthy woodlands, particularly ecologically diverse old-growth forests, play a vital role in offsetting climate change. Both trees and mycelia, from which mushrooms and other fruiting bodies sprout, rely on each other for survival, complicating Western conceptions of nature as a competitive arena where you eat or get eaten, a mantra that feeds the capitalistic ethos that has fuelled much environmental destruction. As the show’s introductory panel notes, symbiotic relationships offer many teachings about reciprocity, respect and curiosity.

The show’s spirit of discovery looms large with works that use artificial intelligence and other high-tech tools, while also reflecting science’s drive to catalogue and classify, although intimate and approachable works in traditional media are also featured. Some works include fungi, which feels almost subversive as galleries have expensive mechanical systems to protect art collections from things like heat, humidity and mould. Imagine an infestation – key spooky music and visuals showing fingers of some strange fungal creature creeping through the pristine white cube.

Perhaps such whimsy was the inspiration for Invasion, a simple yet surprising work by Finnish artist Kaija Kiuru. Her bracket fungi cling to a gallery wall like holds on a climbing wall. Nearby, Victoria artist Rick Leong’s spectacular Nature Morte looks like it might have been painted with layers of green slime. It will feel familiar to anyone who has explored the West Coast’s lush rainforests, where stringy beard lichens drape the trees and mosses are hitched up higher than an old guy’s pants. Leong’s bracket fungi, shelf-like growths often found on decaying stumps, peer out like suspicious eyes.

Toronto artist Diane Borsato, author of Mushrooming: The Joy of the Quiet Hunt, a book with illustrations by Minneapolis-based artist Kelsey Oseid that was published last year, contributes two posters, one replete with evocatively named fungi – ghost pipes, bleeding tooth and wolf milk’s slime mould. One of them, fly agaric, a poisonous red beauty with white spots, looks like the huge mushroom I spotted a few years ago on a boulevard near my home in Victoria. The poster says its hallucinogenic properties allowed a scientist who bravely sampled it to converse with a beer bottle. Do not try this at home!

Unfortunately, the show’s more experimental works remain somewhat a magical mystery tour.  An installation by Mexican American artist Tosca Terán seeks to imagine fungal communication through an interactive video projection and chiming music. A small dark room hosts a mossy tree branch and a glass globe filled with reishi a.k.a. lingzhi mushrooms, along with electrodes and a jumble of electrical wiring. It’s only back at home, after parsing my cellphone snapshot of the didactic panel with the help of Google, that I deduce the black-rimmed amoebic form on the screen might well be my “portrait” based on how I shifted the room’s electromagnetic flow. As Terán says: “How humans move through a space has impact.”

Spore paintings by Chinese Canadian artist Xiaojing Yan and biomaterial experiments by Chinese American artist Helen Yin Chen could also use more context. Individual didactic panels in the show seem to simply reproduce artist statements, for better or for worse. The paucity of scientific literacy and fast-evolving technology are strong arguments for effective communication about science-inflected art. Still, despite this challenge, Symbiosis offers a taste of a unique subset of art that is, by turns, amusing, intriguing and mysterious. ■

Symbiosis at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria from April 1 to Oct. 29, 2023. Curated by Jaimie Isaac and Mel Granley.

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Art Gallery of Greater Victoria

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