How To Get To Make Believe, 2023-2025
solo exhibition installed at the Mattress Factory Museum, Pittsburgh PA, March 8, 2024 - March 30, 2025.
Media: Wood, wool, fabric, paper clay, paint, studio lighting, electronics, foam, plastic, glue, toy collection, cameras, monitors, electric trolley and track, more...
^ Above video is live train camera view riding from the set of Ratlet's Tomorrow Today to the set of Make Believe inside the installation.
Documentation photos by Isla Hansen and Tom Little.
Music for the show was created by Chase Ceglie.
So far, people interviewed on Ratlet's Tomorrow Today include:
Lydia Rosenberg, Imin Yeh, Cata Schliebener Muñoz, Marvin Touré, Bulumko Mbete, Ranee Henderson, Chase Ceglie, Poncili Creación, Chantal Feitosa-Desouza, Naomi Chambers, Devan Shimoyama, Tucker Marder, Addoley Dzegede, Chaco Iwase, and Emma Honcharski for Yinzer Backstage Pass.
Artists / works featured in Ratlet's Collection in the show include:
Mike Kelley, Lady Elaine's original MGR tv studio cameras and Boomerang-toomerang-soomerangs, Xinan Helen Ran, Daniel Allende, Imin Yeh, Adam Milner, Naomi Chambers, Bulumko Mbete, Tucker Marder, Steph Mantis, Jonny Campolo, Cas Holman, Elaine Hansen, Eider Wolf Marder, Marvin Touré, Cata Schliebener Muñoz, Lydon Barrois Jr., Lydia Rosenberg, Emmett Donlon, The Black School, Huidi Xiang, Caroline Kroger, Nick Fusaro, Britt Mosely, Jonathan Armistead, Miller Klitsner, Dylan Critfield-Sales, and Poncili Creación.
MORE ABOUT THE WORK
To better describe the work itself, as an installation, How to Get To Make Believe makes use of the divided rooms of the second floor of the Mattress Factory’s Monterey building to recreate both a talk show set (“reality”) and a fantasy play land (“make believe”), the filmic spaces of the real and the imaginary, respectively. Tunnels are cut through the walls to allow a miniature electric trolley / caterpillar to move through the space and capture its own movement on live train camera, guiding the audience to traverse back and forth across realities and peak through conventional architectural borders. Sculptures throughout the installation include set pieces, puppet theaters, and miniature models with underlying structures and forms referential to furniture. The furniture forms allude to the space’s history as an apartment and artist residency and reference one of the permanent works my exhibition shares space with, Alan Wexler’s interactive moving couch and bed, Bed Sitting Rooms for An Artist in Residence. Two furniture pieces in the show are also made as a direct reference to Mister Rogers’ fictional house set. My two curved benches (placed on Ratlet’s Tomorrow Today show stage set), titled “Conversation Benches,” were built with plywood and dowel and hand painted with faux wood grain to reference Mister Rogers’ set bench, a common pew-like bench you see everywhere in Pittsburgh. My pieces were modeled in the CAD software Rhinoceros and were constructed as curved and skewed versions of the classic set bench with uneven heights to facilitate conversation between one human and one puppet (whose heads end up falling on the same plane in-camera). They are built with a custom honeycomb grid structure inside that I designed to enable toy storage. This structure also makes them stronger than they look. All the works in the show are made with wood, needle-felted wool, paper clay, fabric, water-based paint, and a variety of other media that refer to childhood craft materials, referencing play and making in a domestic setting. The installation’s architectural interventions, photo stage lighting, and a few sculptural tricks give the in-person Pittsburgh audience a “backstage” experience of getting to see the means of production, including what’s “fake,” what’s miniature, what has a hidden mechanism, and how things are made and constructed. They get to see stages, sets, and puppets before they are framed, compressed, flattened, and scaled by the camera and screen.
The TV show I am currently making throughout the programming period and duration of the exhibition, also called How to Get to Make Believe, makes use of these divided architectural spaces, filmic spaces, props and sets to depict three realities: the real real world; an in-between fictional and real world, where a host puppet can converse candidly with real humans; and a fictional space within the fiction, known as the “Mid-sized City of Make-Believe,” an imaginary land mostly inhabited by puppets. In other words, How to Get to Make Believe is a TV show or series of video works for audiences of all ages that features segments of fiction, segments of documentary, and segments of a talk show called Ratlet’s Tomorrow Today, hosted by a puppet I perform named Ratlet, who interviews real artists and real people quite candidly about what they are really doing. Each episode will feature these real world artists, workers, and “experts,” original songs, and will follow a pretend fictional drama in Make Believe. The central recurring theme throughout the TV show is the uncovering and blurring of where the border lies between the real and the imagined, and how play allows us to traverse these worlds and shift these borderlines. Real artists and experts serve in each episode to demonstrate quite literally how play, creativity, making, and practice connect the “not real” to the “real,” or serve to bring up contemporary issues surrounding technology or politics in unscripted conversation. The show will not portray simple binary perspectives on these issues, but instead focus on specific individuals’ stories, and in many instances, present nuanced, complex, and unanswerable questions, stated in the simple language guests have to use with a childlike puppet like Ratlet.