Access Americana

A project on the poetic displacement of class. This body of graduate work is packaged under ideas of class consciousness and class movement. I question what it means to be a successful American--one who has access to leisure, the middle-class, and the freedom to participate in designed escapism. Given my own socioeconomic perspective, I work in investigating my curiosities of the mini golf landscape: who is this for? what factors drive my fascination and obsessions? I examine my own assumptions, values, and definitions of being a “real-American” reveal. In regards to the objective clarity of my ideas, I don’t seek to work in a 1 to 1 communication parallel; there’s an organic wonder in seeing what a viewer brings into it and seeing what they get out of it. I work in the realm of dreams, visceral matter, and poetic thought. I don’t think its beneficial to me or to the audience to give a definite answer to all of this (who really can? I certainly cannot hold myself to any scientific standard). Access Americana is ultimately aiming to poetically examine my experience of class displacement and the vast question of how place can be represented through the external abstract and how can it be reinvented through an internal experience.

The cornerstone project to this body of work is Access American/Fantasy Land is a film that abstractly constructs mini golf as a metaphor to accessing American leisure. The short is to be packaged along with commercials for Access Americana TV. The intention was for the pieces to live in a gallery installation along with other designed objects as a way to respond and reflect on this place of escapism. The objects are visual forms as conduits for narrative. The graphics used in designing these tapestries are my interpretation of this metaphor and an exercise to de-familiarize symbolism--the reformatting of this park in order support my impression of the place.

Revealing the designed place, and often inquiring more than answering, as a way to rethink low-brow leisure and socioeconomic consciousness. And why its location as my subject matter is humorous enough for people... because it’s assumed that anyone can access this place? In a massive stratified lower class, which sections can afford to escape their working-class lives to enjoy a game of putt-putt? The labyrinth of finding your way to such a place, this labyrinth beginning in a rural south Texan Bordertown︎, into the enhanced suburbia that I’ve crossed over in my late 20s.

It is an allegorical connection for experiencing class transference. The shots I framed are also about deconstructing a designed space and its prescribed passages. Navigating the place as an observer, not paying attention to the objective of the game, but to the surroundings—the way people interact with the imaginatively landscaped. With this video I seek to reformat a place in order to support my impression of it, thus altering its place representation