Mall/Flip
Mall/Flip is an installation of 18 aluminum ellipses of different sizes. Fourteen are hand painted with various colours of car paint. Four ellipses have c-prints mounted to them. The images are identical, but of different sizes. The subject is the South Coast Plaza mall in southern California as seen from the air. This shopping plaza sits within a circular ring road.
From the air, the mall, in perspective, reads as an ellipse. The original image was shot from the air and later altered in photoshop. One end of the elliptical view of the mall is seemingly collaged on with buildings upside down. This overtly constructed illusion may conjur up another circularly planned site in California: Disneyland.
The composition of the installation Mall/Flip is derived serendipitously from a small book found at a flea market on a trip to Japan. It was called "Dead Man's Tale" with a front cover of flying ellipses as if exploding from a centre ellipse.
Clay’s reflections on urban culture in California have been influenced by her experiences there as well a 1977 article in “Perspecta, the Yale Architectural Journal” by Charles Moore, entitled “You have to pay for the public life”, 1977 and essays in “The Culture of Nature: North American landscape from Disney to the Exxon Valdez” by Alexander Wilson, 1991.
Mall/Flip conjures up the chroma of animation and automobile culture of Los Angeles - thought bubbles without words. It is a meditation on consumerism, market volatility, and the exuberance of expendable income.
