Wish You Were Here
An invited work presented as part of Hopes and Fears Assembly
Created by Lisa Klapstock
Wish You Were Here is a participatory artwork by photographer and lens-based artist Lisa Klapstock that stages an encounter between two living beings: a person and a plant.
For its presentation at Hopes and Fears Assembly, participants entered a small “forest” of potted plants and chose one with which to spend time. The plants were treated not as decoration or background, but as individual living presences worthy of attention.
The participant and plant were then brought together in front of a photographic backdrop. After spending a quiet minute together, they were formally photographed as a pair.
The resulting portrait became a carte de visite — a postcard-sized photographic keepsake. Participants were invited to write about their encounter on one copy and address it to someone with whom they wanted to share the experience. The card was placed in a mailbox and later stamped and mailed by Something to think about. A second copy of the portrait was given to the participant to keep.
Through this simple sequence — choosing, meeting, looking, being photographed, writing and sending — Wish You Were Here asks what changes when we give another species the kind of sustained attention normally reserved for another person.
The work invites us to consider how we perceive the non-human beings around us and how easily plants can disappear into the background of everyday life. By placing a human and a plant side by side in a formal portrait, the project quietly shifts that relationship and asks us to see both as inhabitants of a shared world.
The experience
Choose — select a plant from the group.
Meet — spend a quiet moment sitting with the plant.
Be photographed — have a formal portrait made of the two of you together.
Reflect — write about the encounter on a postcard bearing your portrait.
Send — address the postcard to someone with whom you would like to share the experience and place it in the project mailbox.
Keep — take a second copy of the portrait home with you.
For the Nuit Blanche presentation, the portraits accumulated over the course of the evening, creating a growing record of human–plant encounters.
The plants
The original installation was conceived around a small mobile “forest” of approximately 30 to 40 potted plants, labelled with their names and, potentially, their origins.
Selected Presentation History
October 5, 2024 — Nuit Blanche, Harbourfront Centre, Toronto
Presented by STO Union as an invited work within Hopes and Fears Assembly.
Lisa Klapstock — creator and photographer
Lisa Klapstock is a lens-based artist whose work explores visual perception and the role of the camera in shaping how we see and experience the world.
Her projects often develop through sustained engagement with particular places and environments, using photography and video to examine relationships between people, landscape and the act of looking. Her subjects have included urban laneways and private gardens, natural and constructed landscapes, tourist sites, cultural bookstores, forests and the Mediterranean Sea. More recent work considers the relationship between humans and the natural world.
Klapstock holds an honours BA in Communication from Simon Fraser University. Her work has been exhibited in North America and Europe, including at the Musée de la Photographie in Belgium, Museet for Fotokunst in Denmark, the Centre Culturel Canadien in Paris, George Eastman House in New York, the Winnipeg Art Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery of Canada and the Art Gallery of Ontario.
Her exhibition Liminal toured Canada and was accompanied by a catalogue of the same name. She has also published the artist books Somewhere (2022) and Dreams of a Place We Have Lived (2023).
Something to think about is an artist-led cultural initiative that brings practitioners from different disciplines together with the public to explore questions arising from a rapidly changing world.
Based in a renovated nineteenth-century coach house in Toronto’s west end, the initiative hosts storytelling, music, exhibitions, performances, talks, screenings and workshops. Its programming is collaborative and interdisciplinary, with an emphasis on exchange, experimentation and shared experience.
Credits
Created by Lisa Klapstock
Produced by Something to think about
Presented by STO Union as part of Hopes and Fears Assembly
Photos
Photos by David Irvine (for STO Union) and Nila Varzhevska (for Harbourfront)
Portrait of Lisa Klapstock by Shelley Adler