The zeitgeist at Rainscape
Above: Standing out in the pouring rain to admire a giant banana car – now that’s the Artscape spirit!
The Artscape experience changes when it involves not blasting heat, as in most years, but a torrential downpour.
High-concept booths inside tents, like Calder Brannock’s “Museum of the World’s Biggest Small Things,” were especially compelling Saturday since – along with re-contextualizing size and referencing 19th century side-show imagery – they got you in out of the rain.
Brannock had the world’s largest eyelash, the world’s largest crumb, ephemera from a man who was always just small statured, but born to a family of dwarfs and, in a plexiglass case, the world’s smallest appetizer, a ten-inch long pig-in-a-blanket.
It was created by the husband of a woman with abnormally large hands, artist Brannock explained: “The idea was the appetizer would make her hand look small when she held it.”
What is that, Mommy? The world’s largest eyelash, honey. Artist Calder Brannock was happy to elaborate. (Photo by Fern Shen)
Here are a few other shots we got before we began to fear for the safety of The Brew’s beloved camera. (And here are some good photos by Baltimore photographer and videographer William Hughes.)
(Artscape continues today with many scheduled events under gloomy but un-rainy skies, according to the forecast.)
- Perhaps a better civic mascot, even, than the Man/Woman Statue or the sloth in the tree at the National Aquarium’s rain forest?
Detail from one of Artscape’s Art Cars.
Was the seat covered in knitting, too? (We never checked.)
Some of the BROS characters really put the mad in madcap.