Mobile Homes
In his "Mobile Homes" series Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary artist Peter Garfield creates tiny, perfectly rendered models of mobile and suburban tract homes. He then flings them in the air and carefully photographs them against the backdrop of a vast sky.
When I first saw Peter Garfield’s “Mobile Home” photographs two years ago, I was immediately drawn in by his lightness of touch. Presented with a disarming nonchalance, these images of suburban houses flying through the sky possessed a humorous innocence — whimsy, even — that directed my attention. And yet there was something too normal about these photographs of very extraordinary occurrences. A disturbing mundaneness colored the otherwise cheerful buoyancy of these fantastic images. Was I witness to a disaster or a dream? The incongruity of the airborne domiciles with sunny blue skies and innocuous cottony clouds seemed to rule out an act of nature. Perhaps it was some man-made catastrophe of a scale only made possible by late twentieth-century technology. In the absence of any definitive answers, I was left with an alternately thrilling and discomfiting sensation — thrilled at seeing a remarkable event, discomfited that I could not interpret exactly what I saw.