House Pencil Green is the collaborative studio of Joseph Herring and Amy Ruddick. Working across performance, video, sculpture, and environmental design, the studio borrows from the unstable social machinery of the circus, the carnival, the fair, the pageant, the cooking competition, the demolition derby, children’s television, early screen comedy, disaster cinema, and obsolete broadcast formats. Across these sources, House Pencil Green treats performance as a way of producing temporary worlds. Costumed characters, handmade props, emitted color, repetitive actions, improvised rituals, live-feed systems, and constructed sets accumulate into unruly apparatuses.
House Pencil Green projects take the form of performances, performance-installations, single-channel videos, video installations, sculptural environments, and multi-day durational works. House Pencil Green uses the moving image as an architectural material and performance as a spatial condition. Video may function as documentation, broadcast, live feed, theatrical device, or unstable atmosphere; installation may operate as set, studio, fairground, burrow, station, or provisional civic architecture. Throughout the work, visibly fragile effects and handmade systems remain exposed, allowing scale, belief, narrative, and environment to wobble between toy and architecture, spectacle and failure, comedy and collapse.
HOTSY TOTSY VRoOoM-O-RAMA
An ice-cream-truck-stop along the way in the evolution of the Hair City International State Fair explores the electro-magnetic draw of the cultural production of carnies as House Pencil Green examines the exquisite sleaze of the beachside boardwalk, the intoxicating odor of the county fair, the homemade surrealism of the midway show, and more…
HAIR CITY FAIR
HAIR CITY FAIR explores the electro-magnetic draw of the art of of carnies as House Pencil Green examines the exquisite sleaze of the beachside boardwalk, the intoxicating odor of the county fair, the homemade surrealism of the midway show, and more…
Mink Hole [NERZBAU]
Mink Hole [NERZBAU] examines the implications and influences of comic book culture on adolescent sexual development from the distanced perspective of an imaginary post-human future, a future populated by highly evolved mustelidea, a future ruled by telekinetic yucca plants forced into technologically dependent reproductive practices due to the extinction of their only pollinator, the yucca moth, and more…
Feast of Flowers
Feast of Flowers was an eight months long residency with the city of Hammond, LA in the form of a series of community collaborations and workshops, culminating in a series of installations and performances throughout the town and more…
HurdyGurdyHotDog
In HurdyGurdyHotDog, absurdist musical theatre, carnivalesque puppetry explore the relationships between carnival cart vendors, carnival foods, and condiments.
TOADSTOOL
TOADSTOOL is a forest floor variety show in which anthropomorphic mushrooms confront issues of scale and compression while struggling to cope with life in their own quantization matrix. Existential crises are filtered through graphic standards as O horizon neighbors including frogs and flies regard their own optimization techniques as proprietary. Toadstool borrows strategies from Greek theater and popular animation to reconfigure organic spectral subjectivity systems.
KAPPA KAPPA BANANA
A performed Yōkai induction ceremony into the Fraternal Order of Art Historical References as a form of pedagogy (the communal singing of hazing-hymns as a participatory lecture on the work of Mike Kelley, specifically his collaborations with Bruce Yonemoto and Paul McCarthy)
Semiotic Street Series
Episode 2: The Extruded Snack
The Extruded Snack explores the validity of the concept that technological advancement can be an alternative to snake oil through a Sesame-style rockoperetta-examination of the myriad of possibilities for human hair replacement technology first presented in 1977’s Fuzzy Pumper Barber & Beauty Shop
Palm State Champs
More from Episode 1: Broward County Botanical Melodramatics and Episode 2: Dade County Botanical Melodramatics here…
LightningFish/LightningBug
LightningFishLightningBug considers the current Caribbean Sea/Western Atlantic/Gulf of Mexico venomous marine fish invasive species crisis through the lens of the mythological while utilising animation, sound poetry, and cut-up folk choreography.
INFERNAL CAKES/ADJACENT MANIAS
INFERNAL CAKES / ADJACENT MANIAS is a multimedia performance representing a hybrid of folk dance, early cinema, televised cook-offs, collision sports (with all of the surrounding pomp and circumstance), and video games. The piece explores the evolution of popular forms of human interaction including specifically: the cakewalk and its evolution a from a cathartic lampooning of plantation society dance into a county fair ceremonial game of chance; the square dance and its relationship as a variation on dances of similar sociological origin including the Quadrille; the live-telecast football event; the cooking-based time management video game and more…
House Pencil Green 