Here is an image of Mandy’s installation at Incident Report, and under the project heading “11 Cornelia Ave.” you can see some images of mine!
Mandolyn Wilson interviews Caitlin Parker
Mandy interviewed me about my installation at Incident Report and about my work past and present. Take a listen!
Caitlin Parker interviews Mandolyn Wilson
Then I interviewed her about her installation at Incident Report and her work past and present! Images of both of our installations can be seen on the Incident Report website and more of Mandy’s work can be seen on her website.
The plants really grew a lot in that sunny window! They love Incident Report! Except the poor manzanita which was always a little sickly and seemed to know it was NOT in California and was not well pleased.
Here I am installing the house.
In the other window, mounted on the same wood that the box for the house is made out of, are some paintings, photographs, and drawings. These are part of the project Involuntary Parks (you can see images from that project on my website), inspired by a trip to Chernobyl I was able to make with a Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grant. While the house is the main piece, I wanted these to provide a context for it, and present some of it’s influences.
This is one of the photos in the window. The sign says “Preserve Nature for Future Generations”. I took this photo in Chernobyl.
These are pretty hot sunny windows and I could only get in there to water the plants every two weeks, so I bought these plant waterer things at Adam’s and these jars at Green in Saugerties (they have a great basement with lots of interesting stuff). The terra cotta base of the waterers draws the water from the jars as the soil dries out. It worked pretty good. The plants were very happy in this sunny window and grew a lot!
In the spring I had a show at Incident Report in Hudson, NY. Nancy Shaver runs the space with Max Goldfarb and his wife Allyson Strafella. They are all amazing artists and just wonderful to work with. Nancy’s store Henry is right next door to IR and she has some of the coolest objects you will ever see in there. You can see Nancy’s store to the left of my installation in the IR windows. 
The name of this piece is 11 Cornelia Ave., the address of my childhood home in Mill Valley, CA. For a while I was calling it 16 Cornelia Ave. because that is the house number I remembered, but after looking at the block on google earth I realized it was actually number 11. We lived there for two years and moved away when I was 7. It is one of 13 houses we lived in before I turned 10 years old. We lived there longer than any other house during that ten year period. This model looks a lot like that house. My sister and I called it, “the sky house”, because of all the skylights. I built it from a dollhouse kit from hbs miniatures that I then customized to look more like our house did. It is planted with California Native Plants from Las Pilitas. Small light bulbs hidden in the rooms are on a timer and light the house up at night.
