Kentucky Perfect

Rolls of sod are laid end to end along a narrow aluminum structure. A wheeled light assembly continually moves across the grass as if scanning it, this is occasionally interrupted by the rapid entrance of a reel mower that cuts back any growth of the last twenty minutes. The lights again return to its methodical sweeping. Periodically, a watering-boom also enters the stage misting the grass according to the atmospheric conditions.

The project incorporates an intentionally overstated measure of technology to explore the very role that technology plays in the culture in which we live. More specifically, the work – in its fantastical amplification of the technology’s use in the everyday – examines how this technology (communications, chemical, genetic) is used to control the environments we inhabit; as a means of making things more convenient, more comfortable, more aesthetic.

It reflects the reality of our culture’s interest in controlling and shaping the natural environments around us, and in this work the creation and maintaining of the ideal lawn. The absurdity through which this is obtained contrasts the reality of our culture, but only in the margin of its additional efforts. The excessiveness nature of the work reframes the reality outside of it, creating a moment in which the familiar is thrown into question and is seen again.

SUPPORT:

Stefan Powell
Rob Cruickshank
Ontario Arts Council

REVIEWS:

Robert Hengeveld at Eyelevel, by Lizzy Hill, Akimblog, April 30, 2013.(Link)

Ambitious Green**sh engages and educates, by Amy Smart, Times Colonist, Victoria, June 12, 2011. (Download PDF)

A neat and tidy synthetic world in Kentucky Perfect, by Victoria Handysides, Here Magazine, Moncton, March 2011 (Download PDF)

Nature in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, by Margaret Bessai, Blackflash Magazine, January 2011 (Download PDF)

Nature, My Grass, by Gregory Beatty, Prairie Dog, Regina, September 17, 2010 (Download PDF)

PUBLICATIONS:

Greenw∞sh, Exhibition Catalogue, Openspace, Essay by Helen Marzolf and Elsye Portal, 2011 N6546.6 G74  (Available Here)