How would you decorate your fallout shelter? The question arose on one of Top Design’s more interesting season two challenges and now Canadian art collective Instant Coffee explores the question with the newest installation at the Toronto Sculpture Garden.
In Disco Fallout Shelter (DFS), Instant Coffee has constructed what purports to be a fallout shelter beneath a grassy knoll in the small park. A closed circuit monitor relays the goings on underground to a viewing station nearby (the tall pink stand). DFS is intended to be a meditation on the notion of exclusivity.
“While Instant Coffee might ‘wish you were here,’ fallout shelters by their nature are places limited to a small group of people. In the case of the DFS, it is only open to all the members of Instant Coffee,” relates the artist statement.
My interest is less in the above ground art, than it is in the decoration of the space itself . . .
. . . so I wrote to Instant Coffee and got some details from collective member Kelly Lycan who says that the shelter that appears on the video monitor measures 8’ x 10’ x 7’. Instant Coffee members Jinhan Ko, Jenifer Papararo, Cecilia Berkovic, Khan Lee and Lycan are pictured inside sleeping, dancing, eating, reading, hanging out.
And what have they done with the space? Well, they’ve had a bit of fun and included a mirror ball, naturally, and some art such as the Bright Lights piece, above, and the Blame Us poster, below. But the walls are painted a muddy, dark gray, not a choice I’d even consider for an underground sojourn. At least the pillows and bedding are colourful and fun.
There are also lots of incongruities. Five people but only four beds? And can you imagine giving up valuable shelter space to have your bicycle down there with you? Oh, and the shelter is padlocked on the outside!
I’m not sure if I’m being too literal or picking up on exactly the details Instant Coffee wants me to puzzle over. Either way, the question remains, how would you decorate your fallout shelter?
Interior shots and video stills courtesy of Instant Coffee
June 5th, 2009 at 11:29 am
Good morning, not so great in small cramped spaces, but I would have soft white walls and lots of color…Lois of and a honking big sun lamp
June 5th, 2009 at 2:13 pm
I liked what Eddie and Andrea did to their bunker in Top Design; it was light and the painting of the tree really conjured the surface world that would be off-limits. I might paper the walls of mine with one of those tacky forest murals — tacky above ground but probably really welcome if you were cooped up under ground.
June 5th, 2009 at 2:22 pm
. . . oh, and I’d paint the ceiling sky blue, for sure. Then I’d try to rig something like a horizontal roman blind in the deepest, darkest blue I could find and pull it across the ceiling each night.