Multi-media installation, 2019, collaboration with Brianna Green, Jackie Ferris, and Hannah Catanzaro

We expect colour in the world. We also take it for granted. To emphasize how jarring life would be if lacking colour, we created this immersive installation to allow people to be in black-and-white as an experience.

One of the most colourful places we could think of was a flower market. We converted a change room into a pop-up flower shop for our installation, and hand-painted every item on the inside to achieve a realistic black-and-white gradation. The experience makes you feel as though you are entering a black-and-white photograph.

As surreal as the installation is, our innate view of colour as human beings is limited when you consider the colour field at large, and so our initial concept of where colours ought to emerge is just as discretionary to take up as “real”.

While we were scheming ways to get our hands on hundreds of artificial flowers to paint over, a community member reached out to us offering garbage bags full of them. Her mom had just passed away, and was an avid lover of flowers and art. We named our installation “Marilyn’s Flowers” after her mother, and kept her picture up inside.