I was asked by Curator Elaine King to participate in a show of self portraits entitled The Likeness Show and decided to do something about my upbringing in an amusement park in the Ozark’s. I was, and still am, fascinated by the competing realities of the amusement park. There’s the back of house and the front of house and both are involved in creating an experience for the visitor. There’s a momentary fiction that is created where everyone visiting agrees to suspend their reality briefly and enjoy the fiction being created around them. For this project, I decided to create two realities and have the messiness of real life creep in. In the main room, I set up a self running PowerPoint presentation and a leak in the ceiling (which drips into a bucket). The PowerPoint proposal starts out as a very corporate proposal for a new ride, but the narrator’s personal issues begin to creep in and the whole thing collapses into a drunk’n affair and car wreck. Just off the main room, we build a Janitor’s closet, with a door that never completely closes.  There’s no indication that this room is part of the show.  It’s up to the viewer to activate the art piece and actually step Inside the closet. In museums, as well as amusement parks, there are back of house spaces that are not to be crossed into. So it feels like a peek behind the curtain. Inside the closet one finds the traditional cleaning supplies associated with a custodial closet, but also running is a an 8 mm projection on a looped projector of my daughter riding a spinning swing. Her expression is pure/real joy. I liked the idea that the true emotion would be hidden in the back of house, while the fiction existed (in this case the leaking roof and PowerPoint proposal) in the front of house.