America Appropriates the World, The EPCOT Center
Travels in Hyperreality
1999                                                                                                                     
See catalogue essay below                                                                                                                 

All images are digital montages approximately 4 ft by 8 to 9 ft  and are scanned from the original negatives.

America Appropriates The World

A fascination with the American cultural phenomenon, Walt Disney World began during my time in graduate school at the University of Florida. The installation America Appropriates the World combines this interest with some of the concerns that I have dealt with in my artwork over  years, issues of veracity and fabrication, photography and tourism, semiotics, and the commodification of experience.

EPCOT Center is one segment of the Disney World grouping of themed parks and hotels that are situated within the corporation’s 27,400 square acres in Central Florida.

A visit to Disney’s Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, (EPCOT) is a visit to the future and the four corners of the world all in one day. Originally conceived by Walt Disney in 1966, he envisioned EPCOT as

“a prototype community of tomorrow that will take its cue from the new ideas and technologies that are now emerging from the creative centers of American industry … [It] would be a showcase to the world for the ingenuity and imagination of American free enterprise.”  

The full text of this essay from the catalogue  Fabricated Communities, Jon Baturin and Fern Helfand   published by McIntosh Gallery, University of Western Ontario, 1999