Playing Pretend as Mother Nature

Description

This body of work speaks to the personal relationship I have with the memories of my childhood as an adult. By playing with sculpture and video, I created a rendition of the alternate reality that my childhood now feels like. I created a series of gardens to highlight my connection with nature and destroyed them in filmed performances. Color tension and repetitive patterns are formal tools I use to entrance an audience into my fantasy. ?Baking? cakes with arts and crafts materials like Sculpey clay, tinfoil, glitter, and sequins and placing them into the gardens is a symbol of celebration and appreciation for play through my process. Destroying them along with the rest of the constructed landscapes is a ceremonial act that is representational of the cyclical events in nature. It represents the ever-changing seasons. It defines and accepts the evidence of death after living in nature and in human life. It indicates life outside of Earth and how it is not the only place to reside.

Filming my performances allows my actions to be archived to create a story. The process of editing that comes with using video as my medium is a way for me to create a narrative about my world more in depth. Storytelling is an important part of how I want to deliver my work. For me, it is reminiscent of playing pretend as a child and creating characters to become and places to exist in. Playing is an art form in itself with an endless life while my work is a mere documentation of it.

Other Projects by Paisley D'Alessandro