Kristi Malakoff situates her work at the intersection of 2-D and 3-D space by inflating imagery from two-dimensional objects back into three-dimensional format.
The Glade was inspired by the iconography of the Victorian fairy tale, Tinykin's Transformations, from the late 1800’s a book by Mark Lemon. The story is about a boy with whom Titania, Queen of the Fairies, falls in love with. Because she is so besotted by him, she grants him any wish he so desires. And so, he wishes to be, in turn, a buck, a fish, a raven, a horse, a mole etc. The story follows his transformations and the ensuing adventures they cause. All the transformations and periods of enchantment happen in a mysterious, glade filled with flowers in the middle of a dark forest.
For her installation, Malakoff had created a set of sorts - comprised of about 20 different, free-standing elements. The large collages, composed of photos of over 400 varieties of flowers, depict various manifestations of Tinykin's transformations throughout the tale.
From the 2006 brochure:
By Curtis Grahuer
In The Glade, Kristi Malakoff has created an immersive environment based on a Victorian fairy tale by Mark Lemon. This installation invites viewers to escape from the reality and banality of everyday life into a fantasy world of fairies and gnomes—a place of both wonder and trepidation.
With 23,000 photographic cutouts of flowers representing 400 different species, it is difficult to disassociate the labour involved in the creation of The Glade from the themes that it addresses. Considering the installation’s inspiration is a Victorian novella, it is fitting that the quantity and detail involved in the work is typical of and highly integral to the Victorian style. Malakoff’s obsessive use of flowers to create textured mosaics of fantastical forms finds relevance in 19th-century England’s fascination and obsession with nature; the colonization and categorization that allowed the wild and exotic to be controlled and manipulated.
The Glade’s encompassing impression echoes the tangible worlds of Disneyland - which Malakoff acknowledges as having influenced her practice. Similar to the ideals, quantity and detail inherent to the Victorian era, every last detail of Disneyland is moulded as part of the Disney universe; it is the ultimate escape, the outside world having been swallowed and sanitized. Disneyland and The Glade are both immersive environments that allow visitors an escape from everyday life, but where the former animates reality, the latter stimulates the viewer to imagine nature animation in concentrated space.
Using a technique akin to parade float decorations, Malakoff never allows the illusion to become too ‘real.’ She impressionistically builds an atmosphere of facts to which one can escape mentally and physically, still maintaining the awareness that it is all a meticulously crafted illusion. In THe Glade, Malakoff has created a world that is critical and conceptual and at the same time boldly manages to be fun and beautiful.
Curtis Grahauer is an artist and writer based out of Vancouver.
Kristi Malakoff is a Canadian visual artist with a BFA from Emily Carr University, where she was the recipient of many awards and scholarships, among them the Alvin Balkind Memorial Scholarship, the Helen Pitt Award and the Governor General’s silver medal for the top Emily Carr University graduating student of 2005. Since graduating, she has participated in artist residency programs at the Banff Centre, the Stride Gallery, Calgary, SÍM, Reykjavík, Iceland and Proekt Fabrika, Moscow, Russia. She has exhibited in an exhaustive schedule in both group and solo shows throughout Canada and in England, the US, Germany, Mexico and Russia. Her work has been featured and reviewed in many Canadian newspapers, journals and arts-related magazines. In 2010, she received a Canada Council Project Grant for Visual Artists. Her work is held in private and corporate collections across Canada and the US.
To learn more about Kristi and her current work, visit her website.