Forest Park Forest Zoo.
8 mins 30 secs, 2010    

Forest Park Forest Zoo is a 16 mm film that memorializes a deserted park located off a country road in Gallitzen, Pennsylvania, which combined a petting zoo with a “storybook forest”.

Today the original snack bars, barn sheds, performing ramps, rusted cages and old women in a shoe house are invaded by wild brush and on the verge of disappearance.

The film pays tribute to currently defunct and decaying modes of homemade cultural production in the North American landscape. And at the same time document, as an entropic event, the disappearance of a place plagued by the bordering forests it takes as its namesake. These apparent contradictions between past and present, vernacular and global culture, the functional and the symbolic are at the core of this project.

                                                Amy O’Neill 2010

 
                                 
Forest Park Forest Zoo, 2010
transferred 16mm and photos
  Forest Park Forest Zoo, 2010
transferred 16mm and photos
  Forest Park Forest Zoo, 2010
transferred 16mm and photos
  Forest Park Forest Zoo, 2010
transferred 16mm and photos
  Forest Park Forest Zoo, 2010
transferred 16mm and photos
  Forest Park Forest Zoo, 2010
transferred 16mm and photos
  Forest Park Forest Zoo, 2010
transferred 16mm and photos