Blood Makes the Grass Grow
Blood Makes the Grass Grow is a site-specific installation I built at Foyer-LA, a gallery in Chinatown, Los Angeles.
When you enter the space, you see a flight of stairs in front of you - they are 18ft tall, 8.5 feet high, and 8.5 feet deep. You also begin to hear something like singing. At that point, you can either walk up the stairs, sit on the stairs, or look to your right, where there is a 4-ft wide space that leads to the underside of the the staircase.
At the top of the stairs, there are five baby vines growing in five pots in a row.
You can sit at the top of the stairs and look out the window at the trees outside in the plaza, or you can walk to the bottom of the stairs to see what’s underneath.
Under the stairs, there is a ramp down to the floor. On the far end of the wall, there is a screen mounted to the wooden beams. On the screen, there are 40 30-second videos of vines that play in succession, each with 2 seconds of black between them. The music is two voices singing, sometimes alone and sometimes together.
The bottoms of the pots are sticking through the ceiling like little speakers, like little surveillance cameras, like ears. Like the roots of the baby plants above are listening to the songs coming from the videos.
When you turn around to leave, you see a vitrine cut in the floor on your right. In the vitrine is a stack of zines with green covers that say Blood Makes the Grass Grow.
Thank you.