KBOO Community Radio and Caldera participants Jaguar, Flutter, and Beans interviewed Fallen Fruit artists David Allen Burns and Austin Young about their exhibit at the Portland Art Museum
By the 1850s, the rutted Oregon Trail ferried large numbers of settlers into the heart of the Willamette Valley. A steady diet of florid guidebooks promised a fecund new Eden where everything grew. Oregon came packaged as a vision of “paradise,” ripe with possibility and a symbol of Westward Expansion and Manifest Destiny.
The artist collaborative Fallen Fruit will explore Oregon’s paradisiacal backyard through the lens of Portland Art Museum’s permanent collection. Based in Los Angeles, artists David Allen Burns and Austin Young create site-specific projects using fruit to examine concepts of place, history, and issues of representation often addressing questions of public space.
The apple is a fruit that has come to represent the hearty bounty of the Northwest with deep connections to the landscape and of westward movement. It’s often a symbol of moral questioning and serves as a metaphoric reference to the Garden of Eden. In Paradise, Fallen Fruit will create an eye-popping immersive art installation in the Arlene and Harold Schnitzer Sculpture Court using the Portland Art Museum’s permanent collections to thematically explore concepts of “paradise,” sublime landscape, and the greater Northwest.
- KBOO