My friends participated in an art auction benefitting Habitat for Humanity this past weekend. The goal was to decorate a plywood cutout of a house in whatever way the artist saw fit. I’m totally blown away by the finished product.
The wood comes from fallen branches in their backyard. That’s reuse for you, pal.
The piece is called “A Community Was Here Once Before”…now, here’s where I get “deep like purple”…I used the house as a base rather than a canvas because I wanted to play around with the notion of the house or home being the foundation for community. The little white houses are actually “ghost houses”, and they represent a community that was there once before but is actually no longer there for whatever reason (natural disaster, economic disaster, etc.). The little neighborhood is actually a ghost town. Maybe it’s a neighborhood destroyed by fire or flood. Maybe it’s a neighborhood that disintegrated because of foreclosure or maybe it was a neighborhood that was only half-way built. Maybe it’s a neighborhood destroyed by economic hardship. Or gentrification. Also in the mix is the notion of an ecosystem being destroyed in order to make room for another ecosystem. Forests are cleared to make way for “land development”; trees are cut down to make the planks of wood that are used to build these houses – each house seems to emerge from each of their woody bases, as if they were carved out of the wood…
via RANCHO COCOA.
