"Johnny Appleseed" (w/ Ally Reeves)

collaborative mixed media installation (2004)

In 2004, Ally Reeves and I were invited to create an exhibition in the Sarratt Gallery at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. The space is unique in it's positioning - it acts more as a large lobby in the University's student center, and as such receives a much higher amount of foot traffic than a closed off gallery might. With this in mind, we tried to create a work which would fill this space out, and also provide an interactive element which would entice passerby to explore the piece.

We chose to focus on the idea of the suburban American front lawn as a commonplace demonstration of human domination over our landscape. At the same time as we wanted to create a caricature of this reality, we also wanted to provide a means for people to "solve the problem", by providing tools to change their environment.

We brought in several truckloads of mulch, borrowed from the Edgehill Community Garden where we volunteered, and walled it in with landscaping bricks. To this new "property" we added predictable suburban landscaping decorations: exotic trees and monkeygrass, path lighting, cast concrete sculptures of deer, birdbaths, a trellis. On the two back walls we hung a mural, done in pastel with pencil drawings stitched on. The mural contained images of eight common plants native to that area of central Tennessee - positioned below each represented plant was a bowl of seeds that were collected from the wild. Participants were able to fill small envelopes with the seeds and take them away, presumably to plant at their homes. At the center of the piece was a television showing a video of Reeves and I as we tried to approach deer in the Smoky Mountains (titled "Approaching"). To get to the video, participants walked across patio stones cast from a topographical relief map of the Smokies - the most visited and most ecologically threatened of the National Parks. The stones slowly crumbled the more they were trod upon.