Even the Apple (2017, collaboration with Susy Bielak)

Even the Apple, an installation created for the international art fair EXPO, Chicago examined perishability from the standpoints of the city, buildings (specifically hotels), and food. The installation incorporated two Construction/Demolition/Salad triptychs, the visual poems The Radial Model and Cultivation Cycles..., and the sculptural installation-meets-artists' book, Even the Apple, described below.

The project employs apples as “designed objects” to examine human intervention and control, perishability, conspicuous consumption, and invisible histories. Text throughout the project is based on research into food production and urban planning, as well as our own families’ histories.

The sculptural installation re-imagines an apple stand—referencing green grocers, market displays, and luxury fruit gift boxes. A 17-foot long walnut case displayed more than a hundred apples, whose compositional distribution was determined using topographic maps.

Referencing the meticulous packaging of mail order fruit gift boxes, a Collector’s edition artists’ book book consists of six vellum sheets wrapping concrete apples nested in a foam bed. Beneath the foam bed lies a 16-page book, whose pages include poems and graphics that explore perishability through the lenses of apples, hotels, cities, and our ancestral histories.

We exploded the artist book into EXPO by wrapping apples in printed poems, and giving those apples to fair-goers as a take-away—introducing a gift economy to the art-as-commerce thrust of the fair.

Collaboration with Susy Bielak

Installation: 18” x 20” x 204” walnut display, die-cut foam, 150 apples), fabricated by Building Brown Workshop 

Collector’s edition artists’ book: 13.5” x 16.5” x 7” cherry wood case housing sixteen 9.5” x 13” archival prints on Hiromi paper, six 9” x 12” digital prints on vellum, six cement apples, wood, glass, foam, ribbon. Box fabricated by Navillus Woodworks

Visual poems: each 27.5” x 39.4,” graphic design by Michael Meier and Lisa Roper

Photographs: each tryptich 96” x 25”

Commissioned in 2017 by Threewalls for EXPO Chicago, curated by Jeffreen Hayes