The wilderness within was a solo site-specific installation at elephant art space in February 2022. In the unique exhibition area at elephant, an artist-run gallery in Los Angeles, I transformed the intimate room into an immersive version of a suburban house garage that displays mundane trappings as well as the bizarre and unexpected. The sculptural works and simple objects speak to entangled lines of inquiry into exotic animal trophy hunting, family ties and secrets, the potent influence of pop culture in childhood, and the pressing urgency of an environmental tipping point.
I pulled from my experiences at my grandparents’ suburban home, which was typical for a tract house in Southern California. There was one crucial distinction-the exotic animal heads that hung with a discarded air on the walls of the garage. Visits to their home often meant a trip into the garage for something, and what resulted was both repulsion and fascination to the mounted heads of a rhinoceros, a water buffalo, and an African gazelle collecting dust high up in the rafters. Inside their home, other bodily souvenirs were scattered throughout, including the bizarre sight of an elephant foot ashtray, the skin dry and cracked, the plain brass ashtray unused despite the fact that my grandfather smoked.
For The wilderness within, I created mixed media sculptures, assemblage works, and collected vintage and personal ephemera to reference those majestic creatures reduced to a state of decay in the garage, intertwined with design influences from my 1980s upbringing, like a rattan peacock chair, macramé lampshades, and buttons and teeny bopper magazine pinups of pop music stars. The walls of elephant have been altered to resemble the dark, unfinished walls and the roll up door of a garage with sculptures hanging from and leaning against them, and the open rafters and unfinished area above the gallery walls play into this illusion. The focal point of the “garage” is a peacock chair, situated on a rug made from a rejected painting covered in pencil drawings, alongside a replica elephant foot ashtray made from handmade paper, wood, and a vintage ashtray, in which sits nubs of my artist pencils painted to look like cigarettes.
I pulled from my experiences at my grandparents’ suburban home, which was typical for a tract house in Southern California. There was one crucial distinction-the exotic animal heads that hung with a discarded air on the walls of the garage. Visits to their home often meant a trip into the garage for something, and what resulted was both repulsion and fascination to the mounted heads of a rhinoceros, a water buffalo, and an African gazelle collecting dust high up in the rafters. Inside their home, other bodily souvenirs were scattered throughout, including the bizarre sight of an elephant foot ashtray, the skin dry and cracked, the plain brass ashtray unused despite the fact that my grandfather smoked.
For The wilderness within, I created mixed media sculptures, assemblage works, and collected vintage and personal ephemera to reference those majestic creatures reduced to a state of decay in the garage, intertwined with design influences from my 1980s upbringing, like a rattan peacock chair, macramé lampshades, and buttons and teeny bopper magazine pinups of pop music stars. The walls of elephant have been altered to resemble the dark, unfinished walls and the roll up door of a garage with sculptures hanging from and leaning against them, and the open rafters and unfinished area above the gallery walls play into this illusion. The focal point of the “garage” is a peacock chair, situated on a rug made from a rejected painting covered in pencil drawings, alongside a replica elephant foot ashtray made from handmade paper, wood, and a vintage ashtray, in which sits nubs of my artist pencils painted to look like cigarettes.
Installation views of the entire space
