Green room of Millie Chen and Warren Quigley.

It's high autumn now, leaves beginning to fall, a rich golden slant to the sunlight. Greenroom, the outdoor installation by Millie Chen and Warren Quigley, placed in position at the Toronto Sculpture Garden last spring, has come to the end of its official tenure there (September 15). When I passed the garden last week, I was amused to find a wedding party holding a photo-gathering in the verdant room, bridesmaids in autumnal gowns the colour of caffe latte languishing over the Chen-Quigley sofa and armchair and reclining prettily atop the artists' coffee table.

Clearly, this pastoral photo-op was a tribute to the remarkable naturalness of this highly and skilfully contrived work. The Chen-Quigley suite of furniture that made up the piece - sofa, armchair with ottoman, Laz-E-Boy-like lounge-chair, lamps (floor and table), coffee table with attached stack of coffee-table books - was cast in fibreglass from pieces of real furniture and then gel-coated in a range of closely registered greens selected by the artists from the FGNG (Field Guide to Naturalizing Greens) palette. The objects nevertheless possessed the quiet sense of inevitability you allow natural outcroppings like mushrooms, suddenly blurting up from the damp ground as if they were always meant to be there. The hard, smooth, green furniture of Greenroom seemed to morph quizzically up into the light from the greensward, covering the garden like eccentrically shaped plants. The entire suite just appeared there one day - like a crop.

Chen and Quigley make the point, in the essay accompanying their installation, that the work is constructed "to respond in an ironically `natural' manner to its surroundings, much in the way that nature adapts to the urban." Given its head (and the permissions granted by whimsy) you might reasonably expect Greenroom furniture to thrust itself up everywhere in the soilful cracks and crevices of the otherwise paved-over city. The artists note that their suite of furniture is tilted slightly towards the sculpture garden's waterfall, as if sinking slowly down into it, thereby aligning the work with the vegetative cunning of real plants: "Structures in nature establish themselves in relation to their surroundings; vegetation is opportunistic in that it leans toward the sun or water, following its own angle of sustenance."

What seems to matter most to Chen and Quigley is Greenroom's proposal and provocation of certain issues involving comfort, sanctuary, taste and privilege. Furniture bearing colour drawn from a customized palette is, according to the artists, already privileged furniture. Because the furniture is specifically living-room furniture, its function is to add identity and presence to that most ambiguously designated of rooms - a mix of private and (invited) public space within the home that speaks confusedly to both relaxation, formality and sometimes (weird hybrid of both) a striving and strained brand of entertainment. "Contrary to what the name suggests," write Chen and Quigley, "the living room is more about fabricated experience than simple existence." Gardens too. Gardens, like living rooms, note the artists, are "sanctuaries for, among other things, reassurance" (thus the invasive rightness of the upscale wedding photos being taken there).

Like the pride of ownership that so often fuels the acquisition of furniture, these privileged pieces stayed all summer in an outdoorsy equivalent to the upscale living room: the upscale garden - possession within possession, nested ownerships striving together. In its summer-long configuration, Greenroom - a living landscape painting or a still life lodged in a landscape - replayed, a tad dispiritingly if you think about it, the role of what Chen and Quigley call a proprietary landscape. Acting out pride of ownership and the burdensome comfort of possessions and, as the artists put it, "presenting social hierarchies as part of the natural order," deception is heaped upon deception. The funereal baked meats of irony have here (to misquote Hamlet) coldly furnished forth the (marriage) tables of pride and optimism. Perfect for wedding photos.