Christos Dikeakos: Trouble in Paradise, exhibition on view March 25 to June 13 at the West Vancouver Museum, 680 17th St. Admission by donation. Opening reception: Tuesday, March 24, 7-9 p.m.
The humble apple is loaded with religious, literary and historical symbolism.
In the Bible, the forbidden fruit represents temptation, sin and knowledge. In the Brothers Grimm fairy tale, a poisoned apple sends Snow White into a deep slumber. In folklore, William Tell shoots a precariously balanced apple off his son's head with his crossbow. And, as the popular story goes, an apple falling from a tree inspired Isaac Newton's theory of gravity.
For Vancouver artist Christos Dikeakos, the simple apple brings to mind all these tales and so much more. For 20 years, he and his wife Sophie have owned a five-acre apple orchard outside of Penticton. Most of the trees on their property were planted 50 years ago and produce old varieties - the McIntosh, the Spartan, the red delicious - and a few experimental varieties that date back to the early 20th century - the Swiss Arlet and the winter banana apple.
Located on the Naramata Bench in the heart of Okanagan wine country, their property is frozen in time, surrounded by newer and more lucrative grape vineyards that supply the burgeoning wine industry.
"We've always resisted clear-cutting it and pulling it out for something else," Dikeakos says of their orchard.
Recognizing that the economy and landscape of the Okanagan is changing, Dikeakos began taking photographs on and around his property that explore the state of fruit orcharding in B.C. and humanity's relationship with the apple. The project started about nine years ago when he came across a barrel of perfectly good apples overturned on the ground, a cornucopia left to decay.
"Of course, the thing was, that there was no market for them," Dikeakos says of the dumped fruit, explaining the price to transport those apples to the packing plant would have been higher than the apples themselves. The sight of the discarded crop got him thinking critically about agriculture, what people grow, what people waste, what the market dictates and how tastes change.
His resulting body of work was the subject of a solo exhibit, Nature Morte, on display at the Kelowna Art Gallery last year. A selection of images from that show make up the Trouble in Paradise exhibit, on view at the West Vancouver Museum from March 25 to June 13. The photos represent different seasons, moods and photographic styles.
"You've got the eye candy pictures which draw you in," he says. A plump red delicious on a low-hanging branch begs to be picked. A cluster of winter banana apples blush yellow and pink to indicate their ripeness. Then there's the waste. His orchard floor strewn with fruit that will never be sold. His pesticide-free crop decimated by tent caterpillars and codling moths. The photo series paints a portrait of the Okanagan agriculture business, its complete reliance on irrigation, the shifting economy and environmental change. For Dikeakos, though, the transformation of the region where he and his wife spend so much of their down time is not nearly as shocking as the rapid pace of development he is currently witnessing outside his art studio in Vancouver's Chinatown. Wine tourism and lush green golf courses aside, Naramata has managed to retain the agricultural values and rural charm that attracted Dikeakos to the area decades ago.
"In Naramata you still have all these controls on the Agricultural Land Reserve," he explains, "so you have farmers all trying to figure out how they're going to make a living, and then you have a whole new breed of deep pocketed-amateur farmers. .. this kind of twinkle dust hits them and they want to become wine makers."
Dikeakos is hopeful that people who visit his Trouble in Paradise exhibit in West Vancouver look beyond the images of trees and apples, follow the narrative of the photography, and ponder not only the viability of fruit orcharding in the Okanagan, but the apple itself as a figure in human history.
