Ivy League…explores the similarities between the rhetoric of the war against invasive plants and the war against terror that is espoused by environmental groups, the mass media and governmental agencies. Under the conditions of globalization, cities are havens for invasive plants, where they thrive in almost any condition, creating lush green oases in the concrete jungle.

Ivy League, a web-based project already in existence, is an interdisciplinary collaboration between Jillian Mcdonald, a Canadian visual artist based in Brooklyn, and Kelty McKinnon, a landscape designer based in Vancouver, BC. Hedera helix (English Ivy) has simultaneously been glorified for its abilities to rapidly anchor erosive soils and filter polluted air, and vilified as an invasive plant which can rapidly dominate native ecosystems, out-competing other plants for nutrients, sunlight and air. The project documents ivy research and encourages visitors to wander the city streets, scattering seed as they walk.

In the context of Parkette, Jillian Mcdonald and her co-peformer Beckley Roberts will extend the virtual hypertext garden of Ivy League into a real garden of ivy planted outdoors in the urban environment. In the ivy garden in Matt Cohen Parkette, the visitor will find signposts like those in botanical gardens, repeating key points from the website. 

The visitor will also find performers are present in the parkette reciting, as though in conversation, the conflicting text of the Ivy League. The pair of low bit pink figures that inhabit the web site will take the form of a pro-eradication advocate, “All species will be considered guilty until proven innocent,” and a pro-ivy advocate 'gardening', “Talk about diverting attention from the problematic use of land and resources that capitalism perpetuates.”(McKinnon, Apocalyptic Pollination)

Jillian Mcdonald states that Ivy League, at once art and political activism, is the opposite of token green space. “Every crack becomes the commons, every leaf political.”(McKinnon, Bruce Mau's Lifestyle) Individual clusters of ivy lose their objecthood and surround the subject. (McKinnon, Getting Down with Downsview Park)  If the garden is culture masquerading as nature, ivy defies cultural control. It does its own thing. While the artist employs it as a cultural metaphor, it defies cultural domestication. 

Visit the hypertext site 

www.jillianmcdonald.net