Fire or Flood Jacket

Title: Fire or Flood Jacket
Place/Time: 2016
Coastal Oregon Artist Residency in Astoria, Oregon (Recology Western Oregon Artist-In-Resident)

Size: varies / ladder 21″ x 14′
Materials: car bike rack and bolts, furniture wood, beach/camp chair canvas armrests, wooden broom and tool handles, lifejacket, tent rain-flap fabric, dufflebag straps and buckles, car windshield shade

Details (condensed):
Evacuation routes and preparedness sirens and drills, Fire or Flood Jacket is ready to wear and provides me the opportunity to reflect on notions of home, adaptability, and perceptions of safety.

Details (expanded):
Evacuation routes and preparedness sirens and drills, Fire or Flood Jacket is ready to wear and provides me the opportunity to reflect on notions of home, adaptability, and perceptions of safety. Climate change extremes, longer fire seasons and rising waters are part of my conversation.

Fire or Flood Jacket might seem like an ingenious invention to best deal with environmental changes and potential disasters, but at the same time for me it is odd, ridiculous, and ill-fitting to the task, or more specifically only fitting to the task potentially if worn 24 hours a day as an everyday, everywhere article of clothing. I embrace the oddity in this clothing contraption as it somehow points to the odd and the multilayered conversations centered around disaster preparedness. Can we prepare for disaster? Through this work I explore the general notion of survival mechanisms that we might implement in our lives to provide a sense, albeit potentially false sense, of safety in order to live in a place of fear or under constant threat of danger.

Through this work I am reaching for security as a state of mind, being resourceful, adaptable and safe in my choices of insecurity. This is preparation and acceptance that goes beyond the disaster kit that may or may not be handy or within reach when danger presents itself.