Meet Me in the Forest
The Forest is an interactive/interdisciplinary variable life-size installation environment. It is created using broken/discarded rakes, shovels, broom, mops, golf clubs and other tall slender objects collected from followers of my work. Combining Marcel Duchamp’s belief that simply by changing the orientation of an object, any object, you can elevate its value and mimicking how a ‘real’ forest grows, the Jane Street Gallery back room will be transformed into a human-made forest. MEET ME IN THE FOREST will invite you to walk its path and experience more than 600 upright castaways that create a magical, educational, and eye-opening visual/audio experience. Stroll down the forest path to ponder our relationship to our consumption.
Community participation "Planting Donation" event:
I invite the local community to donate an object to the Forest forever. The participants are asked to bring any object that is slender enough to fit into the mouth of a gallon paint can. I will supply the paint can and gravel needed to ‘plant’ their object. While participants wait in line, the gallery assistant asks them to write in my journal about the object and then a photo will be taken of them with their object. Suprina, dressed in her 'bag costume' then escorts the participant into the Forest to "plant". Once planted, Suprina asks the person to "say something about the object" kinda like a memorial. This process will be recorded.
I see this project traveling all over the country, each time it’s exhibited it grows. As the project grows, more community hands will be needed to help install it. These ‘hands’ will be ‘touched’ by the experience, they will become more thoughtful, more conscious of purchases and discards. I have seen this happen, people come back to me to express how they have changed their perspective about purchases and how they began to see potential repurposing in items they would normally discard.