This installation came about as a space to host the seed packets for the initial project named the Gardens of Babylon, miniature pieces of art for visitors to Tiny Art Gallery #4 to take with them and share should they so choose. The works were incidental in a way, with two tiny versions of the below:
On the left: The Crèche, on the right: The Crucible Beyond the Western Desert. In a way they weren’t incidental whatsoever, where both deal with ancient anthropological instances of food security. These works address archaeological times and sites where humans were able to have steady access to nutritious food despite the hardships of cataclysmic climate change happening around them. While most likely did not survive, those that did were able to via migrating to places where sources of game, shellfish, and sustaining plant life were readily occurring; through these hard times they passed on both their cultural and genetic heritage.
The Gold Lodge, visually sampled from the David Lynch-iverse, is a place in between, a representation of a place that can not and does not exist, except only ever as a thought-form, a meme made manifest, transmitted, exported. What was a writer’s script and director’s vision was drafted into a set through the work of many hands, filmed for a fictional television thriller and then culturally consumed by folks circa 1989 whom may not have been ready for such an amuse-bouche.
The objects that make a Tiny Art for All Gallery into this version of the Gold Lodge were sourced and made by yours truly in the attempt to dispel the manufactured myth of scarcity- it is not an issue of enough but how it is distributed or, more often, hoarded. The Gold Lodge is hemmed in by a Hermès orange corange, sourced from an actual Hermès dust bag. Some client from my day-job returned several works wrapped up in luxury dust bags cluttering up their townhouse. A lot of money is spent to prevent these homes from the burden of personality. Imagine the win for their housekeeper to both tidy up the California Closet but to also be rid of all that weird stuff cluttering up Greigestone Place.
Here are the armchairs made for the installation. I hadn’t made 3D works much, and it’s still not my first direction I tend towards. But I made these from chopping and grinding down spare cotton rag mat board and then creating a sculpt-able pulp with water and glue, chemically activated through curses and cusses. When satisfied with their dried shapes they were carved with a utility knife for a more sleek appearance and then plastered in air-hardening clay. I carved in some smaller textural details and slapped some mars black on the pair with fashionable gold highlights. and there you are, Agent Cooper, a pair of mostly matching armchairs.
Any Gold Lodge must have a pair of Venuses, de’ Medici and de Milo respectively L to R. These were scaled from wikimedia images of the iconic statues, mounted on hefty cardstock and modge-podged to protect from humidity and the sun. I made a small standing base for them, and they mount upright right thanks to the power of magnetism, foamcore, and well hidden screws.
What terrific wonders lie beyond those Birkin Boundaries? Shimmering golden dawns and geometric dreamscapes thankfully tower just beyond the dimensions of our reality. Take with you what you will and leave what thoughts no longer serve you when you’re visiting the Gold Lodge. What you have ventured to retrieve, bring this back out in the world, this is the hero’s role to their tribe and people of this realm.
To have delved deep like Gilgamesh, plucking from the sea floor an herbal magic, these seeds from the Gardens of Babylon are for tomorrow’s future, neglect them not. Heed them closely and never forget: the serpents are not what they seem.