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.

The overtly constructed illusory view of South Coast Plaza from the air may conjur up another circularly planned site in California: Disneyland.

This work pays homage to a 1977 article in “Perspecta, the Yale Architectural Journal” by Charles Moore, entitled “You have to pay for the public life”, 1977 as well as essays in “The Culture of Nature: North American landscape from Disney to the Exxon Valdez” by Alexander Wilson, 1991.

It is a meditation on consumerism, market volatility, and the exuberance of expendable income.