Orchid hybrid "Aranda Richard Roe," custom glass potting, memoir, reading. Commissioned by Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna in collaboration with NTU CCA Singapore; The Beeler Gallery, Columbus; and Cordova, Barcelona.
Richard Roe is a multi-part work, comprising an orchid hybrid that I’ve named after the legal person “Richard Roe”; a fictional memoir written by Roe; and a reading of that text. The project builds on a convention particular to Singapore, wherein orchid hybrids are named after politicians and celebrities—in effect, as a means of cultural diplomacy. In the summer of 2017, I developed a relationship with an orchid grower in Singapore who cultivates many of its famous hybrids. He let me legally name one of them, which I chose to call “Richard Roe”: a fictional name used in American and British law when the real name of a person is withheld. As this name has entered the registry of the Royal Horticultural Society, it is now bound to every version of this hybrid in the world. Beginning in the fall of 2018, this orchid appears on the front desks of art institutions, where it passes as a banal display flower. Accompanying the flower is a fictional memoir of Roe, published by Sternberg Press in 2019. This text describes the legal fictions that creep around the margins of selfhood—and that increasingly dictate the terms of economic and political process. Taken as a whole, Richard Roe is a natural thing made to perform as a legal fiction, simultaneously circulating through flower markets, art institutions, and the fictive spaces of the law.