I pushed my way through a home-made revolving door into a diaphanous, amorphous, rustling pink antechamber. It was not unlike being encapsulated in a gigantic chewing-gum bubble. This was the entrance to Jaime Burkhart’s conceptual installation project, “Great Accommodations!“
The piece takes its form as a large, inflatable maze, a human-scale Habitrail fashioned from hundreds of disposable plastic picnic tablecloths. Larger chambers within the maze house art, photos, and artifacts relating to river culture. The Marvel, a home-made, bicycle-powered raft that Burkhart and several friends navigated from Kansas City to New Orleans in the summer of ’07 is present in two chambers. The raft itself forms a stage for a video installation in one room, while in another, the pedal-powered paddlewheel hangs overhead.
The installation hasn’t reached its complete form as yet, but it’s getting there, and the going is getting pretty weird. Good weird. I’d stopped by yesterday to help hang some more of the plastic river and do whatever else I could do to help get this trippy tribute to “river culture” off the ground, so to speak.
I encourage anyone who has much business to do downtown to stop in and say “hi” and have a look around. If nothing else, it will definitely take you out of your normal world and pleasantly disorient you.