It's unclear what makes this Miami installation more bizarre: that a hotel is masquerading as a giant, crimson-eyed dog or the fact that there is now a building in the city of sun-bleached alabaster and seafoam that's painted completely black. Last week, for Art Basel Miami, NYC-based artist Desi Santiago teamed up with arts and culture nonprofit BOFFO to bring some (much needed?) gothic gloom to the city in the form of, well, a 60-foot-tall, fortune-telling hound.
To create Gypsy the inflatable pooch, Santiago painted the Art Deco façade of Lords South Beach Hotel inky black and outfitted the building with inflatable taloned paws and a 25-foot head—a similar technique, one may recall, used by the artist who dressed up a London pub to look like a sea monster. Anyway, if that wasn't strange enough, the blow-up canine—yes, Gypsy does indeed look like a cat thanks to a last-minute snout trim, but she's sensitive about it, so just let it go—answers visitors' questions much like an elaborate Magic 8 Ball. So what do people ask massive, demonic, prescient animals? "Fifty percent of the people asked about having sex," said executive director of BOFFO, Faris Al-Shathir. See more of the installation, below, and for those balking at the thought of a black hotel messing up the airy milieu that defines Miami, no need to fret: the repainting starts today and the hotel will be back to the color of fair gardenias soon enough.
· Psychic Architecture? Desi Santiago's Inflatable Fortune-Telling Dog [Architizer]
· Here's a Building Masquerading as a Tentacled Sea Monster [Curbed National]
Loading comments...