What I did at Bass Coast 2015

In an attempt to reawaken my past love of blogging (aka using it as motivation to make stuff), I need to get up to date. Finally, here is documentation of what I did at Bass Coast Music Festival, an embarrassingly, almost 6 months ago. Oopsy.

MAIN STAGE 2015
Main stage this past summer was composed of three different installations: giant wooden tentacles that also spread over other parts of the festival grounds, an ornate DJ booth, and something like 12 000 streamers. I was in charge of the streamers. It was the vision of Bass Coast creator, Liz Thomson, and I made it happen. It was a pretty intimidating, challenging, and tedious project but it was very worth it. It turned out so amazing. They ended up very much looking like a giant breathing sea anemone. The ''tentacles'' all blew in the wind in unison and gave the audience and people on stage a pretty immersive experience plus it doubled as a huge moving, fragmented projection screen. There were 15 lines of streamers on the stage gradating from a wall of 16 feet streamers in the back to 9 foot ones in the front. Then over the crowd were 24 lines of 9 foot streamers. I had the help of lots of really great volunteers and the lovely Liv Lund, who was an invaluable help despite her ankle injury. The following photos I stole from official event photographers' documentation because I knew my photos wouldn't make it look as epic.

 

Photo Cred: Zipporah Naomi Lomax

Photo Cred: Ashlee Zebrah

Photo Cred: Nickolas Collinet

Photo Cred: ?

From the website obviously.

Here's a youtube video of part of Justin Martin's set if you want to see them move:

 
Some set up shots:

THE END, Installation

I also got an art grant to bring my ceramic birds that I made in Mexico to Bass Coast. They hung out in my suitcase for all of tree planting, survived a plane ride, a flood in my tent, and traveling in my car. During the installation, surprisingly, only one got stolen and one broken. It was really hard to document so you have to use these photos and the documentation of my project in Mexico City and combine them in your brain to get the idea of it. See here if you want to know more about it. Liv helped me set up and came up with the brilliant idea of making the twig lamp shade.

STUFF ON STICKS:
New festival tradition. I made friends for the pickle: rainbow unicorn, turd and Green Peaks Party Bear.

Then I raved...

Sleep Picker Sleep

Here is some documentation of the last time I will ever cherry pick. Cherry pickers are really next level up from tree planters on the disgusting scale.

It reads "This site may have been treated with pesticides that could be harmful to human health. People are prohibited from entering unless permission has been granted from those within the company.'' Pretty sure we were in there the 7th.

  

PASSED OUT PICKERS
Anthropological studies on cherry picker sleeping and living quarters as well as insight on diet.
Please note the poor tree planting picker, that has lost so much hope, he doesn't even care that his blue flagging tape is out in the open. 

Beyond the Barb Wire Fence

Every year at the after party for The Tree Planters' Ball at The Knight's Inn, the mass migration to the ''sunrise hill'' happens. This year, for the first time, we crossed the barb wire fence that for some reason we had never thought of crossing before, and things definitely got even more interesting than usual. 

The End (Ceramics)

On new years of 2011, 3-5 thousand red wing black birds fell out of the sky in Beebe, Arkansas. Around the same time 150km away in the Arkansas River, 100 000 fish died. There was never any confirmation of a connection between the two events, nor was a concrete explanation ever offered. The media reports seemed sketchy. This completely blew my mind when I heard about it 4 years ago and I've wanted to do a project about it ever since. After several evolutions of the idea in my head, it finally came out in ceramic sculptures. I made 60 out of plaster molds.

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 Some documentation of all the birds together:

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Then I did a rather experimental street art project. I made the birds to fit on these otherwise useless decorative ledges that wrap around a lot of the buildings in Mexico City that I'm super into. I tried bombing a small area of La Roma the other night which turned out to be a bit of a social experiment. The birds didn't take too well. The glue I chose was a total fail (thanks to the ''knowledgeable'' people at the hardware store). Of the 17 birds I put out, only 10 remained in the morning. Two had been ripped off and left in the same spot. Two had their little leggies broken off, no leg remains to be found. By the time I finished taking photos of them, more had disappeared. Very disappointing. Lesson of the day is epoxy. 

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 In preparation of imminent disaster, I staged all the painted birds together near my house in San Miguel de Chapultepec.

I've got some more future plans for these guys.