I tried something different the other day at the Falls. I found the headless body of a plastic toy sheep and decided to improvise a new head for it. The results are not much different from some of the imagery coming out of Japan. I found a collapsing, materially fatigued yellow rubber ball and added a few acorns, polystyrene ears, and other bits of plastic and then photographed it in the riverine landscape. My kids think it’s cute! Here is another image of it showing the other side.
I’m always finding different toys. Some of which you can see in my Pages collections. I recently came across two other plastic animals and here are their portraits as the river gave them to me. I think they work with the mutant bunny as a kind of genre since they depend on non-naturalism for their effectiveness.
I like that it is difficult to judge scale from these images. They could be very large or very small. That ambiguity has been a part of my project from the beginning. With my other Styrofoam pieces you need to look at what else is in the picture to find clues to judge scale. To my mind, they are all the size of life. It’s interesting to see how the internet treats these images since that can be variable as well. The objects get tumbled by the river, while a similar thing occurs with the images electronically. Here is a recent plastic pony I found and a blue-eyed pink elephant too!
Okay, you talked me into it…here is a bonus image! This was taken during my last outing. If the Pink Panther were one of those bog bodies found in the peat moss of northern Europe…it might look like this. I think this was originally a large, plush toy, but the stuffing is gone now.
Artist at Exit 0 Riverblog 