PORTLAND, ORE.- The Portland Art Museum is presenting Paradise, a site-specific installation by the Los Angeles-based artist collaborative Fallen Fruit (David Allen Burns and Austin Young). Fallen Fruit draws on the Museum’s vast permanent collections to create an installation in the Museum’s grand entrance hall exploring the themes of “paradise,” idealized landscapes, and the greater Northwest. Paradise is part of Fallen Fruit of Portland, a suite of site-specific projects presented by Caldera that takes place throughout Portland from October 2015 through January 2016.

“…I was upon the summit of a tall mountain which commands a bewildering prospect of that loved valley… The birds of autumn caroled their soft melodies around, and the blushing flowret bent at the feet of the intruder… Away to the north was the smoke wreathing above the trees which clustered around the lone mission-house and I thought there was an altar to God, and incense from the bosom of the wilderness.”
—Excerpt from A Sketch of the Oregon Territory, or Emigrant’s Guide, Philip L. Edwards, 1842.

By the 1850s, the rutted Oregon Trail ferried large numbers of settlers into the heart of the Willamette Valley. A steady diet of florid guidebooks promised a fecund new Eden where everything grew. Oregon came packaged as a vision of “paradise,” ripe with possibility and a symbol of Westward Expansion and Manifest Destiny.

The artist collaborative Fallen Fruit explores Oregon’s paradisiacal backyard through the lens of Portland Art Museum’s permanent collection. Based in Los Angeles, artists David Allen Burns and Austin Young create site-specific projects using fruit to examine concepts of place, history, and issues of representation often addressing questions of public space.

In Paradise, Fallen Fruit create an eye-popping immersive art installation in the Arlene and Harold Schnitzer Sculpture Court, including an apple-themed wallpaper custom-designed for the Portland installation. The artists use the Museum’s permanent collections to thematically explore concepts of “paradise,” idealized landscapes, and the greater Northwest.

“The apple creates an ideal backdrop to this exhibition,” Burns said. “It is a fruit that has come to represent the hearty bounty of the Northwest, with deep connections to the landscape and of westward movement.”

Added Young: “The apple is also a symbol of moral questioning, a metaphoric reference to the Garden of Eden. Collaborating with the curators of the different collections, we have built a narrative about ‘paradise’ and man’s impact on the landscape. Ultimately, we have created an installation of this region’s great natural appeal—and its modern challenges.”

Fallen Fruit’s exhibition at the Museum is part of Fallen Fruit of Portland, a suite of site-specific projects in collaboration with arts and nature mentoring nonprofit Caldera.

Paradise is co-curated by Fallen Fruit in partnership with Portland Art Museum staff from the Education, Curatorial, and Collections Departments.

Fallen Fruit is an art collaboration originally conceived in 2004 by David Allen Burns, Matias Viegener and Austin Young. Since 2013, Burns and Young have continued the collaborative work. Fallen Fruit began by mapping fruit trees growing on or over public property in Los Angeles. The collaboration has expanded to include serialized public projects and site-specific installations which invite the public to experience the world as a fruitful place. The artists have realized projects at a range of institutions including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Hammer Museum-UCLA, Atlanta Center for Contemporary Art, and Prospect 3 New Orleans. They have created related apple-themed projects at Cathedral of St. John the Divine, New York City, and Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Omaha, Nebraska.