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Andrew Kromelow's work is primarily concerned with creating an opportunity for a common experience. His meticulously crafted, cartoon-like installations often create absurd situations or spaces for people to gather and interact. Kromelow wittily marries disparate, but related, activities to form bizarre and seemingly ridiculous
circumstances that attract viewers' participation. Like a circus ringleader, Kromelow leads participants on a journey through a fun, idealized fantasy world.
Kromelow's MetroTech Maypole Poetry Trailer Park continues his participatory, fantasy-world theme. He presents four small, colorfully painted and finished trailers each labeled with the name of a great American poet. Each trailer has a window cut out through which viewers can peer inside and view a portrait of the corresponding great poet. On the side of the trailer, viewers can also push a "play" button to hear a reading of the poet's greatest writings. The four poetry trailers circle a tall, colorfully painted maypole, a symbol of unity. Of this work, Kromelow says, "The trailers bring poetry to MetroTech.
The MetroTech Maypole Poetry Trailer Park invites people to listen to great American poets of times gone by. Linking their pasts with our present, people can sit [by] the trailers, listen to loops of poetry, and write their own poems under the watchful eyes of the immortal poets." Like a summertime camping vacation, MetroTech passersby can relax by the trailers and contemplate the words of Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, T.S. Eliot, and e.e. cummings.
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