About the Installation
Secretly Abandoned Spaces is a large-scale art installation and an Honorarium Art Grant Selection created for Burning Man 2022 by artist and sculptor Valerie Mallory
and illustrator and concept designer Mikell Haynes.
The piece is a visual story about places we have all lived, but are
now abandoned and forgotten. Abandoned buildings retain a beauty of
that which has been forsaken; it's the loveliness of disintegration.
For additional information, please visit: secretlyabandonedspaces.org.
- Lead Artist
- Valerie Mallory
- Concept Art & Design
- Mikell Haynes
- Structural Engineering
- Rick Damiani
- Lighting
- Dusty Williams
- Lead Builder
- David Meakin
Philosophy
Every abandoned space retains a feeling of what it once was: a
library, a railway station, a beautiful house. When stripped to its
remains, we see a different kind of beauty — a beauty of that which
is forsaken and left adrift. Time takes back its own. Elegance that
emerges from loss tells the story of predicted and necessary change.
This piece is about the beauty of loss and decay. One enters an old
house where mortals used to live and created stories of their lives.
These souls still live in the walls of this haunted space. The house
becomes a church of collected ideas from a past era.
Secretly Abandoned Spaces is an ephemeral museum, a piece that tells
the story of forgotten moments lost with the passage of time: a
lonely place, surrounded by red trees and haunted with cast figures.
Figures of a Forgotten Place
The cast figures that inhabit Secretly Abandoned Spaces are as
ornate as structures of antiquity. The expressions on their masked
faces echo the elemental ways we integrate with the world as we pass
through it.
The interplay of figures tell their own stories. Some remain inside,
sitting or standing in places they still hold on to. Others wander
through the desolate area around their old home or hide in the
branches of the surrounding trees.
