The reality of our information Society is that if one can use their knowledge to imagine a new transgenic lifeform, then molecular biologists with adequate funding, should be able to reduce the abstract concept to life. Invention in a DNA society is essentially reduced to a challenging but solvable engineering problem. Society, especially artists, can influence the direction of scientific advancement by presenting challenging new possibilities to inspire scientists and the institutions in which they work.

The meat Plant is a surrealistic representation of a plant-animal transgenic chimera, a plant that grows meat. The Meat Plant when reduced to its most functional level represents the idea that by inserting animal genes, animal proteins and amino acids could be produced in plants. Recognizing the essential structural function of roots in sustaining plant life and their role in absorbing nutrients necessary for growth, Jacques Deshaies has incorporated animal feet into the roots. Roots with hooved and clawed feet of farms animals symbolize the "absorption" of animal genes into plants, animals, and now DNA, in modern agriculture.

The Meat Plant is also meant to be experienced on a purely aesthetic level since the poetic qualities of the bonsai tree formed the basis of the form and lines of the figurative drawing. On a symbolic level, the bonsai, patiently pruned to conform to the aesthetic ideals of human society, reflects the growing capabilities for human intervention into the growth, characteristics and functions of all life forms.

Jacques Deshaies, through his association of the Meat Plant with factory walls and smokestacks, also portrays plants as the factories or bio-reactors of the future. The factory floor is symbolic of plants as platforms for gene insertion to produce new products. Powered by the sun, these photosynthesizing hosts for genes from other species will produce a range of new food and fibres. Inserting human genes into plants will allow us to pharm plants to produce medicines. Crop production of fuels and plastics will grow larger over time. The future holds that we won't just think of plants as just food sources but rather they will produce a wide variety of industrial products.

Jacques Deshaies simultaneously frames plants in both a deconstructionist and holistic manner; from the infinitesimal world of molecules and cells to the seemingly infinite size of the stars and universe. Post-modern deconstructionism is represented by the microscopic elements - the spherical cell, the four cylindrical base pairs of the DNA double helix and the gene sequencing map. Simultaneously, through these same elements, Jacques Deshaies considers life from the holistic perspective of the living planet, Gaia and the Spaceship Earth. We are reminded that there is harmony between the micro and macro levels of the universe that humans must respect as stewards of planet Earth.

by Jock Langford, Environnement Canada - Ottawa - June 1998