Beachwood (2018) by Natalie Feldesman

In Beachwood, I paid homage to dead shopping malls. The pieces I created are memorials of a dream, where spirits rule. This aspect of my work is similar to the conjuring of a fortune teller of a future archeological site, where my work portrays memories of a past society, which worshiped consumption.

I see the space as a kind of zombie; the dead man, the zombie known to us from the voodoo religion and horror literature, is neither dead nor alive, but more dead than the dead. This excess of death makes him a little alive. Similarly, these spaces which are left abandoned never die, and it is this excess that allows it to continue to live.

Therefore, I created a place where still-life artifacts resurrected themselves to populate a routine day to day space. The dead mall, has much to say of our society; the center of today’s culture, our modern day temple - where money is the god we worship, as well as raises questions of what is to come.

The installation is in limbo, a symbol of the American dream, which has been adopted world wide, a surrealistic hyper-colorful space, where the viewer walks through a scene, passing one absurd sculpture after another.