Californian artist Chad Wright's Master Plan,his sandcastle suburb, superbly symbolises The American Dream.
And how easily shattered our dreams can be.
He built a suburb of sandcastle houses on San Francisco's China Beach. It's meant to mimic the look of a typical post-war tidy suburb with its mass produced identical houses, neatly positioned next to each other, just like the little boxes in the 1962 song recorded by Malvina Reynolds, Little Boxes.
But in this very symbolic art installation,
all the little boxes are swallowed up and destroyed by the encroaching tide.
And when the tide recedes,
there's nothing left but dreams destroyed.
What does it all mean we may well wonder.
The global financial collapse, the real estate bubble bursting, the end of a dream, the impermanence of our lives, our world?
You choose.
For this wonderfully clever and meaningful project, Chad created a plastic mold that's filled with sand, you know, in the same way we made our own sandcastles. And dreamed...
That is one way of getting your point across.
ReplyDeleteLove the whole project...
ReplyDeleteTime to wake up from the American Dream.
ReplyDeleteMy brother and I used to do that in the 50's when those style homes were new. We built old structures called sand castles using littered paper cups from the concession stand for molds. I have a picture of. my brother sitting beside them just like Chad in the photo. Same thing happened even then. We eventually stopped building sand castles and started building dreams.
ReplyDeleteHistory is fairly consistent. Castles crumble and man continues to build bigger clusters.
This is beautiful
ReplyDelete