Jungle Fence
“Jungle Fence” is a living map of an autochthonic imagination rooted in ripe boundaries of assumed reality.
Offering an invitation into a lost jungle found only through recovering an obsolete app and expanding the space of a backyard, this exhibition builds on the idea that cartography exists from a divine desire to draw human-made lines/fences across existence, thus forging a defined space/jungle to explore freedom. In essence, this piece deconstructs the idea of paradise as a destination in lieu of infinite mapping [Action=Paradise].
Combining MAP LAYERS into an art installation living inside the allotted 10 x 10 space, “Jungle Fence” projects a film masking like a vibe costume on top of framed 2020 art relics: a quarantine desk, laptop, and monitor each with differing imagery and video time-capsulating the jungle and the fence from varying hero's journey plot points. “The pace of nature is patience” as the dad says from a pool while the despondent daughter sits in a robe on a lounge chair orchestrating the triumphant music of forest growth and leading the backyard in her imagined discantus supra librum ala a jungle descant.
While the film rolls and the set holds space in present time, the video on the monitors shifts from edited, linear footage to a cacophony of time warps 5 years later with the tree zenith in the backyard cut down, the film trapped in a defunct editing software phone app, and the past-fawning-present world combined into a land/soundscape of frequency playing the melody of nature’s worst enemy - forgetfulness. The space between jungle and fence cracks open like a secret seed in loose soil as a live dance movement by the daughter in front of the desk embodies the search for freedom, the hope that imagination will never be fully fenced, and the ritual of finding paradise to losing it so we can experience the joy of, possibly, finding it again.
If maps challenge the existence of a home zenith, “Jungle Fence” acts as a Miss. EnScene of map layers joined together within an atmospheric Being forging, like an actress playing alchemist, a feeling of possibility. Warning: Possibility does not have an answer - the after effects may result in feelings of bliss and/or torture.
ARTIST
This installation is the art baby of Christine Hauer, a writer, filmmaker, performer, composer, inventor, and bard creating experiences that ignite authenticity. When Covid happened in 2020, Christine lost her job in event planning and had to move back into her childhood home with her parents. She decided to make a film about discovering a jungle in her backyard after her parents said they had to cut down her favorite tree because they were afraid it would fall on their house. Christine shot and edited a 75% completed short film called “Jungle Fence” and then got distracted for 5 years before realizing in 2025 the app housing this film and all the footage was now obsolete and there was no way to export it. Also her favorite tree, the star of the film, was cut down. The density of fence-to-jungle has greatly shifted realities since 2020, and “Jungle Fence” seeks to directionalize the space through a series of layered maps:
THEME
If maps challenge the existence of a home zenith, “Jungle Fence” acts as a Miss. EnScene of map layers joined together within an atmospheric Being forging, like an actress playing alchemist, a feeling of possibility. Warning: Possibility does not have an answer - the after-effects may result in feelings of bliss and/or torture.
“Jungle Fence” is the definition of PARADISE LOST + FOUND because the sadness of thinking the original Jungle Fence film was lost inside of a phone app forever and then the joy of realizing we could save it by using imagination was Paradise. To lose paradise and find paradise, you must know paradise. And “to paradise” (if it were a verb) means capturing it in a heart-shaped fence for us all to explore together.
MAP-LAYER 1 - projected daughter discovers a hidden jungle alive in her childhood backyard taking up masses of unseen space between her home and her favorite tree while trying to prove to her parents, worried about the tree falling, that the tree is safe.
MAP-LAYER 2 - short film in post-production stuck inside of a now-obsolete editing software within the phone of the daughter trying to save a tree from being cut down.
MAP-LAYER 3 - desk with a laptop, monitor, and iPhone showcasing videos from phases of fencing in a jungle. There is an exercise ball chained to a desk for guests to explore expansion beyond the limits of “escape” with the suggested idea that we are always free within our Self.
MAP-LAYER 4 - wall with drawings, paintings, and words written during 2020’s quarantine by the daughter living at home with her parents as daily expressions of sanity checks and soul-muscle flexes to push daydream limits beyond the world’s inferno.
MAP-LAYER 5 - original nature-inspired soundscapes in a relay race between the layering maps of a never-ending jungle fenced in by the past and the daughter lost in her present, hunting for imagination.