Amazed
Amazed creates and installs adventures of sight and sound semi-annually for the High Point Furniture Market. This 4000 square foot merchandising concept area focuses on a new theme each Market, and this Market’s theme is “Ten Senses of Good Vibrations.” Songs we all know and love are transformed into vignettes of visual expression, demonstrating that a small budget a whole lot of creativity and local talent, and the design direction of Mike Farrell of Imagine adventures can result in something amazingly inspiring.
Check out Mike Farrell’s facebook page for updates
Or take a tour with Mike through October 2009’s AMAZED installation, “A Trip to Aahs”
THE FLYING MONKEY BAR
Toto and Dorothy’s three buddies expose the Wizard to be a fraud. He escapes in a balloon and leaves Oz bankrupt. Oz, that once gleaming model of capitalism, with a booming real estate market and a thriving “everything dyed green” fashion industry, becomes a heap of emerald crumble. A mass exodus of Oz-fashionistas follows and soon its polished luster rusts and fades.
Enter the era of Vintage Oz. A feverish Oz-Glasnost-bohemia takes over. The city reinvents itself, evolving into a place for artists and musicians and writers. Oz’s new youthful climate turns revolutionary. The city becomes eco-friendly, and for the first time in its history, a truly green town. Those that stay in Oz make it progressive and sexy. Oz becomes a cool place to call home.
When I first imagined this post-wizard Oz, I knew its heart beat in the hottest underground club in town: the Flying Monkey Bar.
My very talented friend Tim Dudley has done many projects for me in the last few years, mainly with spray cans, Sharpees, and acrylics. This job required him to interpret the attitude and personality of a place, an imagery of three Oz legends and flying monkeys in his edgy street style. New building restrictions inspired the use of air brush instead of paint cans. For background I gave Tim just three images: Tin Man, a gay “Chelsea boy”, the Lion, now a DJ, and the Scarecrow, a street smart biz-man by day, popular clubby by night. Tim is one of those few artists I have met that gets what I am talking about, and runs with it. I remember seeing the first sketches on paper. Dude, I said, that’s it! The bar is made of recovered scrap wood and 100 back lit discarded wine bottles. Absinthe is the drink most ordered here.
I live my life in a bubble
Somewhere over the rainbow there’s a care-free Midwest beauty queen that floats around in a rose colored bubble waving a glittery star tipped wand, wears enough pink crinoline to make a harem of wives for the Scarecrow, and insists on meddling with your wardrobe.
Yet, she is every young girl’s dream come true. Effortlessly happy, dreamily unattached, and flawless down to her red waves of hair, she’s perfect right down to her name, an acronym of Good and Linda (Spanish for beautiful).
Having always been fortunate, she never had to be crafty. She travels around in her ultra quiet eco-friendly UV globe shielded vehicle, maintaining her rosy complexion and impeccable hairdo. Everyone around her is 2 feet shorter, allowing her great clarity of vision into her future. Her days are spent teaching young girls the significance of home and family. Face it. She is the essence of sweet.
As she seemed to us a gleaming seamless floating bubble, Kathleen fashioned her, literally, of bubble gum. Waves of sugary sweet red “licorice” laces became her hair and she was clothed in a bubble wrap gown, because, above all she is a lady, and certain fragility is expected or at least projected.
It’s fine to be sweet and naïve, but I felt she needed depth. So we gave her exquisite taste. That explains the Eli Chair, Little Mac Ottoman and Florabunda Khotan Rug all designed by Carol Bolton, whose creations embody an uncommon balance between depth of thought and levity of spirit. The gleaming sphere lamps are from Bobo Intriguing Objects. Forever the bubbly optimist, she collects bubble makers and keeps an adequate supply of bubble gum close at hand.
The poppy field Alternative
Dorothy wakes up in the stunning field of poppies and says, "I’m not going to no big emerald city full of smiling, singing freaks, purple horses, and nothing in sight that’s not painted green!” Why should she? Sometimes we chose to stay in the garden, and Dorothy has found the mother of all poppy fields to call her own. She has a great view of the city and three sexy new pals with whom to play. So she blows off Oz and Auntie Em, tosses the blue check dress, and, her feet aching, chucks the ruby slippers. “That meddlesome pink bubble lady slapped those bad red shoes on me with her little star wand and never even asked my size, she complains to the scarecrow. Plus they shed little sparkles everywhere I go leaving a trail for that shoe obsessed witch to follow.”
Dorothy, practical yet creative, uses the shoes as pots, planting hens and chicks, rosemary, Thyme and parsley in them. Every time a new traveler to the Emerald City falls asleep in the poppies, she takes grabs their shoes and plants them with flowers and herbs. In the distant sun drenched hills Dorothy and company sew hemp plants and start a booming business selling eco-friendly spun yarn to the Emerald City. After a long day’s work she takes to her burlap covered chaise to rest. Realizing she'll save a fortune on sleep aids, she screams into the sky: lay it on me Witch!
The creative poppy making contributors for this room; Sandi Hirz, Melanie Colton and Julie Marriott of Liberty Rose Design, say they love flowers, but admit they would have gone on to Oz- to shop for fabulous shoes, stay in a comfy hotel, and see “Witches” the musical.
Emelies provided Dorothy’s burlap covered one arm chaise.
Black and white
Dorothy’s Black and white world is about to change… in more ways that she can imagine.
The 1939 movie amazed the world with Technicolor camera technology. Dorothy’s Kansas was a world of blacks and whites. A terrifying and violent storm transported her into a dreamy peaceful place ablaze in color.
In Dorothy’s journey I see our past. America, a country of hope and promise, a century after the Civil War, was mired in racism and segregation. The parallels between this young girl’s story, and the coming storm that would change the world, are the inspiration for this stark and thought provoking vignette.
The peace sign is a collage of more than 600 black and white photographs of segregation era America, the race riots of the 1960’s, the Greensboro 4 Sit-In, and the heroes who inspired change. Nearby Greensboro was the site of one of America’s most important equality protests- the sit-in at Woolworths, started by local black college students. The white only lunch counter had chairs and stools, while blacks had to stand and eat. The sit-in that began with only four students sparked a massive movement throughout the Southern states as more and more protesters engaged in this type of demonstration, including economic boycotts that became a hallmark of the American Civil Rights Movement.
The fabric floor covering is by Adesal Jacquards, called Find The Peace. We took hundreds of pictures of hands in recognizably communicative formations. These pictures were laid out in a patchwork of white hands on black ground and black hands on white ground. Hidden in a myriad of “ok’s” and “thumbs up” are handshakes, touching fingers, and peace signs.
When turning to face across the aisle you open the door to a world of color.
Color Served Here
Dorothy leaves her Black and White world behind her and discovers a world of color. Beautiful and peaceful, Dorothy quickly learns that there are other struggles and difficulties to be faced, even though the storm has passed and her black and white world behind her.
The collages in this room are made from thousands of paint chips collected from local home improvement store paint departments, Post-It and Office Depot sticky notes and crayons. The area rug is a 9x12 random mosaic for which we collected more than 5000 colorful chips used also for other parts of the installation including the melting witch. The two crayon collages: “Put a Little Color in Your White House” and “The Rainbow Washington Monument” are made of more than 5000 Crayola and Roseart crayons.
The giant back wall mural is 10 thousand colored sticky notes forming a naïve genre depiction of the U.S. (Hawaii and Alaska share exaggerated proportions for lack of wall space).
The name for the room comes from one of the black and white pictures I found while finding images for the peace sign mural. A photograph of a prominent segregation era sign: COLORED SERVED HERE sparked the idea to illustrate an era of America-in-Color. 48 years after the Greensboro Sit-in, a young black-American was elected President of the United States. Using the internet, Twitter, and text messages, voters were mobilized and in January of 2009 the White House, like OZ the movie 80 years prior, became Technicolor.
THE COLOR OF MONEY
As Dorothy finds out, all the glitters is not. The Color of Money vignette opposes the “a Toast To Wonder” room.
This would be modern financial wizard we know all too well, as the events of the last year prove. In this vignette you get a humorous glimpse into a wizard’s penthouse pad just as he is discovered and has to flee the scene. The vignette is pimped out in a variety of decorative creations inspired from the madness and frenzy of the money rush prior to both the 1930’s crash and the debacle of recent months.
Ready to lift any would be crook into the sky, the room sports a fabulous chair completely upholstered in vintage bank bags and tied to not one, but hundreds of helium filled balloons.
A TOAST TO WONDER
At furniture market all of us are Dorothy’s. We know there really is “No Place like Home”. We’re here to show or find those special things that help make our digs a place we can call home.
To me, growing up in a home often filled with the warm mouth watering aromas from the kitchen, there is nothing else that tastes as much like home as bread.
Wonder Bread, the first mass produced and packaged sliced bread, changed the way we bought one of civilization’s oldest commodities and foodstuffs. Part of a revolution of life-style, buying pre-made, liberated us from our kitchens. This as well as many other industrial innovations increasingly gave us time for leisure, especially to travel, as did Dorothy, to see the world.
Art students from Central High School, in High Point, NC, under the creative tutelage of our candy witch making sculptress, Kathleen Parker, embarked on a journey of bread and toast- an artistic depiction of the Seven Wonders of the World completely made of toasted Wonder bread. These are made by first mapping out the image in grids of sliced bread sized squares. Using aluminum foil as ‘shields’ and a toaster, the slices were toasted into different shades of brown. Finally, the finished quadrants of toasted bread were mounted to form a picture. Under each work of toast art is the name of the “Wonder” in scrabble letters.
Obviously, the Oz movie costumers picked Dorothy’s blue and white checkered dress to depict home, hearth, summer picnic, heartland, and a country table spread tablecloth. So when we found a picnic basket lining type design in red and white checked vinyl at Hobby Lobby we grabbed it for the floor. The zinc table is from Bobo Intriguing Objects. Spread with flour, eggs, bowls and rolling pins, we are, like all of us at market, ready to make some dough!
In the News
October 2009’s AMAZED Installation, “A Trip to Aahs” was the buzz of Market long after it was over...
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