OUTER SPACE PARADE FLOATS WITH GREENHOUSES
2013
The concept arrived shortly after my second daughter was born. We spent a lot of time in our garden and I discovered a new passion for planting, weeding and creating a green space. This combined with a sudden introspective, full-fledged “I’m a mother” feeling made me much more thoughtful about the world and the spaces we inhabit.
I became interested in extracting activities and spaces related to leisure, life, and notions of beauty from the world that surrounds me. I was also interested in the innate uncanny found in cultural traditions related to the “spectacle”. In parades, flowers and animals become icons for beauty, ornamented with sparkly flags, glittering lights and streamers. In this series, the paintings depict outer-space-parade-floats with greenhouses. The floats are in the shape of animals while being spaceships holding greenhouses with elaborate gardens. These encased gardens are lit by stadium lamps, movie-set lights and range from flower gardens to wild forests. The spaceships represent iconic animals such as eagles, lions and swans. They resemble familiar air/space craft constructs with welded metal for siding. For example, the swan has the material body of an airplane, smooth white exterior and a dome greenhouse stands-in for the swan’s back. The eagle is covered in strings of miniscule LED lights that describe its shape. The greenhouses are either pulled as trailers or built-into the floats.
