Nature is wondrous and clever. As Darwin taught us, those who improvise most effectively prevail. There are species who under threat revert to earlier forms, others who cultivate parasitic relationships with neighbouring beings, while the most inventive ones transform their bodies to mimic and seduce unsuspecting companions. The Orchid and the Bee is an expressionistic VR ode to life’s struggle for existence, explored through a chain of genetic love affairs.

Flowing freely between unsettling disembodiment and empowering creation to offer an uplifting vision of our evolutionary future, interdisciplinary artist Frances Adair Mckenzie brings her mischievous sense of play to the realm of virtual reality by combining the tactile materiality of old-school stop-motion animation and stereoscopy with cutting-edge technology. The result is a beautifully crafted five-minute immersion into a reimagined primordial soup of life—where the survivors are not the strongest or most intelligent, but the most adaptable to change.

Frances Adair Mckenzie

Frances Adair Mckenzie has exhibited in Canada and Europe. Her work negotiates speculative investigations into concepts of materiality, staging and form, most often through the interface of digital technology and sculpture. Frances’s augmented reality book, Glossed Over & Tucked Up, was published in 2016 by Montreal’s Anteism Press. Her association with the Nation Film Board of Canada began with the 10th edition of Hothouse, when she created the surrealist animated short A Little Craving. The Orchid and the Bee is her most recent NFB project.