Think of works with a slightly sinister cast within the vast history of botanical art, and you may recall Dutch master Rachel Ruysch’s luminous bouquets in shadowy spaces, Henri Rousseau’s ominous jungles or Vincent van Gogh’s vases of intense, manic-depressive blooms. Unless you are Seven Days music editor Chris Farnsworth, who, when told of the exhibition “Dark Botanica” at BCA Center, immediately referred this writer to Christopher Walken’s classic 2008 “Saturday Night Live” sketch “Indoor Gardening Tips From a Man Who’s Very Scared of Plants.”
It’s hard to say who is more adorable in the bit — an understated Walken, afraid that his cactuses will stab him or his ferns choke him in his sleep — or his collection of house plants adorned with googly eyes. But he succinctly sums up something few have articulated: “The only way to know where you stand with someone is to look into their eyes, right? Normally, plants don’t have eyes, so it’s hard for me to trust them — hence, googly eyes. Still, a good rule of thumb is, don’t turn your back on a cactus.”
The artists play on the sense of unease, alienness and darkness that has long been the subtext offlowers’ association with the feminine.
Like Walken’s, the plants in “Dark Botanica” are all a little unsettling. Not vastly so — there are no man-eating Audreys or killer tomatoes or zombie funguses here. Rather, the artists play on the sense of unease, alienness and darkness that has long been the subtext of flowers’ association with the feminine.
The most overt works in this regard are a suite of paintings from New York City artist Alina Bliumis called “Plant Parenthood.” Flowers are, after all, reproductive organs, as Bliumis makes clear with her straight-on, confrontational compositions of blooms. Each painting portrays a species that has historically been used to terminate unwanted pregnancies.
Bliumis’ use of watercolor on wood creates a textural effect that makes the images look almost like crayon or colored pencil. While they reference watercolor botanical illustration, the style gives them a folk-art flavor. Each work is framed with velvet in shades evoking old-fashioned ladies’ room décor. The overall effect is one of defiant softness — an acknowledgement that women have long maintained networks of botanical and activist knowledge to control our own bodies within patriarchal systems of oppression.
Stowe artist Marcie Scudder’s installation “My Mother’s Garden” likewise explores women’s relationships and intergenerational knowledge. According to its label, Scudder’s mother, a Holocaust survivor, planted a large garden as an act of healing; the artist inherited it and now maintains it on her own. She has cut, folded and sewn her photographs of plants into garlands of geometric paper flowers that drape down from the ceiling like bougainvillea. Yet we never really get a full picture of the landscape. The work references the craft traditions and gardening know-how that are commonly passed from mother to daughter — but also easily lost.
New Yorker Dylan Griffin and British artist Sian Fan take the botanical in a sleeker, shinier direction. Griffin’s still lifes draw on his background as a commercial product photographer. “Spanning” and “Zuhur” present flowers arranged with metal wire or bits of tubing, sharply defined by exquisite lighting. “Velo” masks a bouquet with a chartreuse blur; in “Frukt,” a backlit silhouette of flowers and rocks emerges from metal grids, its glow suggesting an LED screen. The images position the cut flowers as objects within a seamless ecosystem of natural and human-created forms. Each of these still lifes has the personality, mystery and aesthetic hyper-perfection of a model in a high-fashion ad, and each gives the impression that it’s selling something.
Fan’s two 30-second animated videos, “Dream Diver” and “Stinger,” offer magical, glowing flowers that look plucked from a video game. Fan based her compositions on large-scale paintings by Kate Bickmore, “sculpting” the flowers in virtual reality, according to her website. The blossoms unfurl and close up with smooth, mathematical movements, petals and stems swinging around each other in a fluid dance of folding shapes that resemble crumpling origami. Ambient soundtracks by Ben Dixon augment the drama. The work is ambiguous but feels narrative, the flowers like characters ready to sap or restore a viewer’s vitality, depending on how the story goes.
Mystical, otherworldly vibes continue with large-scale paintings by Cameron Davis and Sage Tucker-Ketcham, both of whom live in Charlotte. Davis’ “Poetic Ecologies Series, Listening for the Lyrics” is a three-panel piece almost 7 feet high by 15 wide. The primarily metallic gold composition organizes a chaos of well-defined, representational leaves, with drips, stains, shadows and extemporaneous marks. Taken together, they can be read both as abstract and as a reasonable representation of the forest floor.
Davis’ palette rewards longer looking with burgundy, turquoise, peach, green and orange that emerge slowly from the overall gold haze. The painting’s deceptiveness comes from its lack of ground. The composition offers the occasional solid foothold, such as the panel breaks, but it’s as unstable as a carpet of leaves floating on a pond.
Three vertical 3-by-5-foot works by Tucker-Ketcham anchor the back gallery in parallel to Davis’ work in the front. Two years ago, Tucker-Ketcham presented a solo show with a blue-green palette; the paintings displayed here use a red-to-green spectrum instead. Delicate fronds, grasses gone to seed and tangles of weeds stand right up at the picture plane, as though the viewer is in a near-impenetrable field. Red blobs are equal parts blossoms and old wounds. Pops of pale blue sky peek through dark green shadows and an orangey miasma so familiar it almost smells of late-afternoon October. These works present the scrub at the edge of the garden as a realm that is fantastical yet real, beautiful yet unglamorous.
Megan Bogonovich’s ceramic sculptures, while a little further from recognizable, fully celebrate biological weirdness. Works from her “Dark Botanicals” series cluster on a table, reef-like. Some have flowers, some knobby appendages such as eggs or ears or spikes. Glazes range from black to opalescent; textures, from raised scales to painted stripes to spongelike holes. Many seem to reference reproductive organs, reminding us that, stereotypes aside, some parts of flowers are male.
The works are goofy but inscrutable; they might hide just a hint of threat behind their bright colors. Next time, I’ll bring googly eyes. ➆
“Dark Botanica,” on view through January 23 at BCA Center in Burlington. Panel discussion, January 14, 6 p.m.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Dark Seeds | A show at BCA Center presents the unsettling side of flowers”
This article appears in October 28 • 2026.
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