Gallery I
Orchid Archive
Nic Wilson & Lindsey French
Nov 21st, 2025 – Jan 23rd, 2026
Orchid Archive is an exploration of communication. It questions the assumed durability of boundaries between species, senses, and beliefs. In some ways, this project is an attempt to speak in a language that is not our own; to blend understandings and to explore the radically divergent meanings that can be attached to things like words, images, and smells. The work tends to the atmospheric commons through dreams and translations of eroding archives, interspecies relationships, and airborne futures.
The project is centered around a piece of writing and a scent that treat communication as a discursive activity that unites beings from across a wide range of lifeforms. The writing recounts a dream about an archive that has been embedded into the DNA or orchids. They are tended by a nameless dreamer whose life’s work is maintaining this unreadable archive. They are a steward. They are alone in a cave with the orchids. They live off of the stems and petals of the flowers. They keep a counter-archive filled with their speculation about the content of the flowers.
The scent evokes the orchid cave with green notes of plant- signaling compounds blended with buttery and animalic notes of cave cheese and the funk of human sweat. The work is presented as an installation with video work, a soundtrack, drawings, and light. In this constellation of work, a signal can be picked up momentarily, and then it passes or wafts away. Encrypted Archive is not concerned with precision but with emanation. Sometimes we lose the signal. Each element has been chosen to highlight the way life is deeply entangled with other life in ways that defy any sharp boundary we, as humans, might find comforting.
