An early project study for "They call me theirs". The exhibition at LAL was site specific. New work and new materials were explored. Green landscape extension cords were used as "vines" and as a tool to activate the hanging garden prints, moving them away from the walls.
The installation reverses the experience of the outdoors by packaging the four seasons in a “Box Set” that plays on a video monitor inside a handmade hardwood box, one you can carry around with you, rather than go outdoors. A “hanging garden” composed of large scale ink jet prints on aluminum sign panels, surrounds the box. 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?”
"They call me theirs", LAL Art Center, Lexington, KY, 2009
