1. An old horror film trailer to set the tone for the show
2. Overview of the Botanical Readiness project, as it stands
3. Formats for proposed works: wall-based series, but possible options for environmental objects
4. A bit on the exhibition environment
5. A thematic detour: Joe Dallesandro

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Here is the trailer for The Gardener (1974), aka Garden of Death, aka Seeds of Evil:

You can track down the full feature, but I can't really recommend it. If you sap all the charms from a Radley Metzger film, and forget to include sex, and permit a single scene of bloody violence to try to compensate for it all, this film is the result.

If this was Joe Dallesandro's escape from gigolo typecasting, it didn't work. He appears in brief moments as a bare torso with a few stilted lines.

Related: Planting of the Seeds of Evil (2006) where director James Kay and actress Katherine Houghton reflect on what went wrong, and unrealized mythological pretensions of the film. Dallesandro chimes in.

Also: The Gardener's Seeds of Evil Killed My Million Dollar Dream (1980), a very low-budget documentary where producer Chalmer Kirkbride Jr. laments the failure of the film, and the doc takes a sizeable digression into the marketing of Phantasm.

Dallesandro's experience with gardening, however, is brought up in a recent interview with Bruce LaBruce:

Although Botanical Readiness is something I introduce as a "gardening digest", the GAG show won't be specifically about gardening, but it will certainly be driven by botanical thinking and gardening experience.

The online BR volumes are intended to be a mash of properties: practical, reflective, exploratory and bizarre. As a corporeal manifestation of this project, I would like for it to become an alien incursion into the GAG space: insensible, unruly and high.

Prior to BR, I had been working on a series of paintings of "conjurors", based on 1970s images of people in some sort of hobbyist seclusion, and this aligned with my time spent working as an assistant to a garden designer.

I prefer to see "botanical art" stretched into unfamiliar forms, and mixed with other topic interests. In my case, it always gets rolled up into sci-fi, architecture, psychedelia and cultural nostalgia.

Last October, Catie and I made an outdoor sculpture for GAGFest to represent BR, which I am thinking of as the seed form of the upcoming exhibition.

Here are some of my inspiration images for the GAG installation:

I will be seeking works in a series (at least 3 items to a series) from artists and botanical enthusiasts that can be separated and dispersed throughout the space. Works should be on the smaller side so that they can be conducive to new grouped arrangements.

There will not be any wall labels — all artworks will be traceable to an illustrated field guide that I will publish for this show.

When organizing exhibitions, I do like to set a tone with some prompt materials, but I'm not expecting artists to adhere to them exactly. Overall, I am looking for odd works, conducive to a mixed and organic arrangement scheme, that can help to create a feedback loop into the BR continuum. I'll surely end up promoting the show as a "botanical exhibition", but I will aim for the space to become something more oblique to the topic and enigmatic, and befitting the intrinsically psychedelic experience of gardening and botanical encounters.

There will be other elements affecting the GAG space: colored lighting zones overtaking the gallery lighting, sound design elements from audio artists, and physical objects (leaning, hanging) to help reshape the space a bit.

As Joe Dallesandro is a prominent feature of the film trailer meant to seed this show, artists may treat him as a thematic ingredient or as a full alternative. In other words, you are welcome to push as hard into Dallesandro territory as you please, even to the point of relinquishing grasp of the botanical notions/suppositions that generally drive this project.

I am also open to proposals for physical implements. Similar to the wall-mounted works, I'm looking for a series that essentially breaks up the GAG space. They can lean against the walls, hang from the ceiling, or intervene in the space in some fashion. Let me know if you have any ideas.

I will publish this online in early May, and I'll think about outreach later this winter. For artists participating in the GAG show, I'll be happy to include documentation of that work as an entry for that season, preferably encumbered with supplementary materials and thematic extensions.