The Oasis Of The Juicy Fruits 

9/21-10/14 2023 Center for Craft

 

For our most recent installation “the Oasis of the Juicy Fruits”, within the Center for Craft’s “Krafthouse: Forest Of The New Trees”, we were asked to imagine a “post-major event Appalachia”. In response, we built an interactive Post-Scarcity U-Pick Orchard inside of a subterranean geodesic dome.  

 

Through this highly collaborative multimedia experience, The Oasis of the Juicy Fruits gave visitors a glimpse of a future of sweet abundance and care, and paid technicolor homage to our region’s cherished craft and folk traditions of gourd art, Appalachian quilt styles, limberjack puppets, square dancing techniques, fruit note singing, basketry, fruit jam preservation, and William Bartram’s 1773 descriptions of pre-contact agricultural sites in the Georgia Piedmont. Woven into the fabric of this creation is an imaginative fusion of American psychedelia/ outsider art and agroforestry/futuristic fruit grafting that marks a crossroad of unconventional artistic expression and a yearning for a more community focused future. In this harmony of tradition, innovation, and creative wonder, The Oasis of Juicy Fruits beckons all to partake in the dance of life.