Mary Carothers & Sue Wrbican - Artists' Statement
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. . . She's running on fumes and in a hurry to get gas . . . |
Tourism presents every traveler with the opportunity to create a bit of their own circumstantial media. |
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| The trailer is covered with a poem about two female artists working together to produce a photograph of a burning couch. The artists in the poem think they have extinguished the flames, but as the car speeds off down the hill with the charred remains strapped to the roof, the force of the wind awakens a sleeping dragon, unbeknownst to the driver on her way to replenish the bone dry gas tank. A car stalled at the gas pumps is a fortunate situation in most circumstances. Fortunately, the rest of the poem is not history, but our own mythology. In contrast to the tale of the burning couch, the Suburban has it's tires rooted in fact rather than fiction. It is painted Safety orange to resemble a government vehicle. Although somewhat "official" looking, this "marked vehicle" is intricately veined as a road map tracing our journey beginning in Louisville, Kentucky, into Niagara Falls, on to New York City and ending in our original homes, both in western Pennsylvania. Numerous sites are marked with graphics of TV monitors to signify the discarded video tape (our "Lost Stories") we found on the roadside. The vehicle also bears several functioning TV monitors, facing outward from its windows, plus three large circular domes and over 50 antennas projecting from its roof. |
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| Our travel spanned July 2nd to August 14th, 2000. A solid week was spent dealing with mechanics and logistics, jumping through legal hoops and cordial visits to the insurance agency. As one mechanic pointed us in the direction of the next, one DMV official gave us enough information to find a fire inspector who then waved us through his share of red tape "sight unseen." We learned to maneuver without maps and instead followed the "signs". Mechanical malfunctions, with their intrusion on the agenda, lead us to places we would have otherwise forgone. Even though we had turn signals on the trailer that did not agree with the Suburban's, even though turning on the headlights meant locking up the brakes, and even though a failed brake system made our grand entrance into Canada a slamming success, we had no indication that our dry-rotted trailer tires would introduce us to the Wally Byam Caravan Club rallying in Liberty State Park where we would be made honorary members. After accepting their invitation to camp we returned from breakfast one morning to find our broken door lock had been repaired by Nelson Church, an Airstream service mechanic bound for Panama. |
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| The installation in the basement gallery at CEPA is a campground of video tire-fires and snowdomes, each relating fragments of these and other experiences while camped at Niagara Glenview in Niagara Falls Canada and Liberty Harbor Marina and RV Park in Jersey City, NJ. Seeing the numerous houses of horror on Clifton Hill in Niagara Falls, we asked "What does Frankenstein have to do with Niagara Falls?" In hopes that our question might be answered we purchased a book entitled "Shadows of the Western Door" by Mason Winfield. In the chapter "Track of the Illuminoids", is a map illustrating Niagara Square in Buffalo. The author points out that three streets, Niagara, Genesee and Delaware point to major forces of earth and fire. It is suggested that Niagara Square could benefit from a balancing energy of fire. We thought a video of a burning couch could be just the ticket for Buffalo. | |||||||||
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On visiting our transient studio while parked in Jersey City, the artist Joan Watson mentioned that tourists sometimes learn more about local legends than the fulltime residents. Or vice versa. While camping with the Wally Byam Caravan Club a member mentioned that our trailer had been pictured in the Metro Section on the New York Times. In the article, "The Great Outdoors, Minus the Trees", we read that a dead body had been discovered floating in the Marina during our residency there. In that case the media knew more about our "neighborhood' than we did. One Canadian living on the street behind the campground wandered up to our trailer seemed a little disgruntled when he learned we were celebrating freedom of expression instead of Christmas. He made a point that another camper in the park kept guns in his truck and grunted a parting shot as he shuffled away, "you should know who is camping in this campground." All told, it was swinging on the ropes between myth and life that drew us closer to our audience. |
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