Detail
Centering a group of plants, the work assembles a range of interpretive strategies—physical synthesis, optical translation, and reflective surfaces—each functioning as a distinct mode of signification. These approaches generate a layered index of the plants’ presence, producing images, abstractions, and proxies that attempt to stabilize and communicate their form.
Yet, rather than resolving into clarity, this accumulation of representations exposes the limits of such systems. Each method produces a partial account, foregrounding specific attributes while obscuring others, and in doing so reveals the gap between symbol and subject. The plants themselves remain irreducible, exceeding the frameworks designed to contain them. What emerges is not a comprehensive taxonomy, but a field of competing interpretations, each contingent on its own logic and constraints.
In Monarchical Index, Bryn Jackson draws attention to the authority embedded in acts of classification—the “monarchical” impulse to order, name, and define. By staging these processes alongside the living entities they seek to describe, the work destabilizes the notion of representation as neutral or complete. Instead, it positions knowledge as a constructed and often extractive act, shaped by systems that privilege legibility over relational understanding, and control over coexistence.