Concept rendering for 2025 installation PLAYHOUSE, Columbus Parkway, Buffalo, New York.
PLAY is a multiphase toy reclamation that transforms big plastic toys into art.
I’ve spent three years collecting discarded toys from the side of the road around the city of Buffalo. I built my first installation “what should i get her for christmas” (below), which exhibited at Raft of Sanity, Buffalo, NY in 2023. I will use big blue plastic toys to build the next installation for PLAY called PLAYHOUSE. PLAYHOUSE will be a life size version of “what should i get her for christmas?”. It will transform the exterior of my house in the lower west side of Buffalo into a site-specific art installation. Think blue and exuberant. Imagine the front porch of my house brimming with discarded plastic toys, with only a single opening to access the front doors. Its absurdity will harness the universal power of play as a language that cuts through age, class, and ethnic barriers. It is also a reminder that the short lived, replaceable joy of toys have a long lasting effect on our environment. PLAYHOUSE will exhibit from April to May of 2025 on the street where I began collecting toys three years ago.
Future phases of play may include, but are not limited to PUSH TOY MONSTROSITIES, a solar-powered GARBAGE that floats from port to port collecting big plastic colorful toys. The toys collected from the GARBARGE will become THE GREAT PYRAMID OF TOYS, a colorful landfill made from 100% plastic toys.
what should i get her for christmas?, 2023, Crayon, found toys and furniture, 40 in x 50 in x 50 in, Raft of Sanity, Buffalo, NY.
Artist Statement from “what should i get her for christmas?”.
They are the vessels of imagination, the tools of childhood exploration and wonder. Yet, in their vivid hues and joyful noises, lies the silent weight of excess, the unnoticed encroachment of consumerism that invades our homes, our lives, our environment. They arrive as gifts, tokens of love and affection, but accumulate, forming mountains of neglected treasures, each one losing its charm, buried beneath the next, in a never-ending cycle of replaceable joy.
In confronting this colorful deluge, two paths unfurled before me: allow these relics of joy to plunge into the abyss of eternal waste, or breathe into them a second life. I choose to let them play again.
what should i get her for christmas?, 2023, Crayon, found toys and furniture, 40 in x 50 in x 50 in, Raft of Sanity, Buffalo, NY.
what should i get her for christmas?, 2023, Crayon, found toys and furniture, 40 in x 50 in x 50 in, Raft of Sanity, Buffalo, NY.
From left to right: is that a rocket ship?, a pink one, a shiny, 2023, Crayon, approximately 8" in x 2 in x 2 in, Raft of Sanity, Buffalo, NY.
From left to right: is that a rocket ship?, a pink one, a shiny, 2023, Crayon, approximately 8" in x 2 in x 2 in, Raft of Sanity, Buffalo, NY.