Amy O'Neill

Mixing and matching an abandoned Story Book Forest, historical Victory Gardens and a bar called Joe's, in this artist's book Amy O'Neill unfurls middle-American stories to create a feral landscape in which childhood memories rule. The project is designed by O'Neill for the Centre Culturel Suisse in Paris.

This journey through the American suburban imagination--by Pennsylvania-born Amy O’Neill, who currently lives and works in New York--reveals the uncanny that lies just beneath the banal. O’Neill’s work is situated between the past and present, vernacular and global, high and low cultures. Her sculptures, installations and drawings trade in recycled bits of Americana like bald eagles, carnival midway games and basement rec rooms. As critic Gregory Williams writes, O’Neill’s work looks back, "nostalgically to those sites in the American cultural landscape that leave a deep-fried residue on one's childhood memories.” A recent installation, "Forest Park Forest Zoo" (2007), memorializes an abandoned roadside petting zoo that O’Neill found off a country road in the midst of a Gallitzin, Pennsylvania, forest. This first monograph includes a text by artist and writer John Miller.