World’s Fair looks to the world’s fair exposition as the model for many conditions of contemporary life and leisure – shopping malls, theme parks, and museums, as well as the use of media production and exhibit display methods to sell consumer products, technological innovations, and nationalistic ideologies.
World’s Fair is comprised of twelve 1-minute video vignettes that combine photo collage, still image animation, documentary video, and sampled film footage to form a fictitious place, hypothesizing about what might have been and at the same reinforcing what has come to be. The work juxtaposes the contemplative, detached vantage point of the photo panoramic with the flat, aggressively abstract space of the video footage – a shopping mall amusement park ride, a geodesic tropical greenhouse, the Greek-like ruins of Philip Johnson’s New York State Pavilion. These video images play with the tension between nature and the synthetic; controlled environments and the wild; vicarious (virtual) experience and imminent threat, pleasure and violence.
Exhibited at University of Missouri-St. Louis Gallery 210 (2006-7), City Without Walls, Newark, NJ (2008), and BBC Big Screen Liverpool (2008).
