I’ve been thinking lately a lot about the installation I created back in 2016, “Field of Dreams”, as a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center. The Fellowship took place in Provincetown, MA for 7 months from Oct- April. It was a highly productive time for me and a place where I was afforded the time and space to dive deep into my history with mobile home parks and trying to navigate how to best describe my experiences.

This is one of the first sculptures I made where I was directly thinking about the term “American Dream”. This term has always been in my vocabulary and part of my childhood growing up. My dad spoke a lot about it in indirect ways by telling us; “One Day” we would be able to … go on vacation to Disney World, have a bigger house, have nicer clothes, go out to restaurants, and the list continues. “Field of Dreams” stems from that phrase and was a way to create a cathartic release for myself.

Field of Dreams consisted of 7+ plywood cut-outs with images of mobile homes standing about 4 FT tall. These homes were staked into the ground and transportable via the roof of my jeep that I had at the time. This allowed me to install them in different locations and configurations. The first installation was located at the Truro Air force Base on the cape. The field where they were placed is an old overgrown baseball field that just a few hundred feet from the ocean.

One of my main intentions for this installation was to create my own neighborhood in places I deemed as idyllic locations. More often than not mobile homes are highly regulated and placed on undesirable plots of land. My parents neighborhood is located next to a busy Interstate and from my experiences and travels these parks are often pushed to outskirts of cities hidden by rows of trees and fences. This was my way to elevate these neighborhoods and bring awareness to there existence.

Final Installation view of “Field of Dreams”

The homes I chose for this installation were a mix from several locations including two different mobile home parks on the cape. The mobile homes on the cape had a specific style unique to the area adorned with buoy’s and bright colors faded from the sea salt. In a future post I’ll talk about going door to door in a local trailer park as my attempt to talk with the homeowners. I even made a colorful wrapping paper made from photographs of their homes which adorned packages that I gifted to them, but this is a story for a future post!

“Field of Dreams” @ Arlington Arts Center, VA

I later traveled with this installation to Arlington Arts Center outside of DC in Arlington, Virginia. I was invited to do a public artwork on the front lawn of their gallery. Before it became a gallery it was an old Elementary School Building built in 1910 and in 1976 converted into the Art Center. This building has a colonial look and would be in stark contrast for another iteration of “Field of Dreams” to be installed. So in 2017 I installed this work on the front lawn.

Before the signage could go up the curator had people knocking at the door enraged by this display. The curator explained to me that they were upset that someone was making fun of this type of housing. After she showed them my artist statement and talked with them about the work, they calmed down. This was a response I was excited to receive. I wanted people to bring their own personal emotions to work. The gallery is located on a busy road that runs through town and is highly visible. I imagined that with each passing car or person walking by they would form their own interpretation of this display, one most likely riddled with stereotypes and stigmas. This was yet another way to reclaim space.

Its important to bring affordable housing to the foreground and elevate this type of housing which could benefit so many more Americans but has been looked down by our culture for so long.

I ask myself how can we change the way we view these homes?

Maybe its as simple as changing the name to something more popular like pre-fab construction? The government tried that back in 1976 when HUD upgraded the regulations for construction materials and started calling them "manufactured housing” instead of mobile home or trailer. I also think that the Co op neighborhoods I spoke about in the last post with Kathy are a great alternative. If we can turn more neighborhoods away from the big corporations and into these Co ops I believe more people would be inclined to move there.