"They Call Me Theirs"
A line from “Hamatreya” by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Site specific exhibition LAL Lexington KY
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Scroll down for images of Hanging Garden prints
The exhibition at LAL is site specific, new work was introduced as well as new materials. Green landscape detention were used as "vines" and as a tool to activate the hanging garden prints. The prints are no longer confined to walls.
They call me theirs
The installation reverses the experience of the outdoors by neatly packaging the four seasons in a “box set” that plays on a video monitor inside a handmade hardwood box, suggesting that our efforts to purify our experience with nature have actually taken us farther away from it. A “hanging garden” composed of large scale ink jet prints on aluminum sign panels, surrounds the Box Set. The prints were sourced from video stills, then painted, and digitized, creating a luscious though synthetic environment.
The title of the work is taken from a line in the poem “Hamatreya” by Ralph Waldo Emerson, which questions man’s desire to claim ownership of the land that is inherently owned by nature. In the poem, the Earth responds, “How am I theirs, / If they cannot hold me, / But I hold them?” Similarly, the exhibition holds a sound-insulated cabin or shrine for the viewer to enter. A handcrafted hardwood box containing a small personal monitor with images of the four seasons sits inside. Two different cacophonous soundtracks play from both the interior and exterior, highlighting the tension between the realities of the two environments.
