Virgil Marti, GROW ROOM 
Nov 15–Dec 22, 2002
 
For the inaugural exhibition of PARTICIPANT INC, Philadelphia-based artist Virgil Marti produced a new site-specific installation, GROW ROOM. As with the whole of Marti’s work, GROW ROOM infuses objects of taste, high culture, and aesthetic excess with allusions to his first loves, as cultivated in a suburban, crafts-based world of macramé, Lucite grapes, and Charlie’s Angels posters. That these two worlds eventually collide, rendering their socioeconomic origins indistinguishable, is the logical expression of Marti’s project. In this case, his milieu of seamless contradictions contains a series of Venetian-style chandeliers that are cast from antlers—the Grand Salon meets hunting lodge in an elegant marriage of opposites. Mylar used for constructing basement hydroponic grow rooms is the substrate for his idiosyncratic hall of mirrors. These printed Mylar panels are covered by flora and webs, all rendered from strictly synthetic sources, such as an extensive collection of fake flowers, selected for their melancholy iconography.