south

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	The Palm Tree is the Blonde of the Vegetable Kingdom
	Most everyone knows where north is: it's the direction that has a literal magnetic attraction. But south, is a state of mind: it doesn't even have to be south, it could be on the equator itself. South is a romantic cliché with a language and soundtrack and an icon: the palm tree. South is any coastline where a coconut can wash ashore and take root. The palm tree that results completes the image. The palm tree embodies a whole library of fantasies in western culture. Remote. Beautiful. Unstressed. Rootless. Timeless.
	The paintings of south examine the fantasy of the palm tree amidst the crisis of a rising ocean and vanishing coast. In June of 2004, I read about the Maldive Islands. The Maldives are one of the countries worst effected by the trend in warming, with the multiple island nation's shoreline rising an average of 5 feet in 3 years. This island nation, with its 2000 year old civilization, is poised to be entirely submerged, becoming the first nation casualty of global warming. The devastation of the December 2004 tsunami, that struck while I was completing this series of paintings, demonstrated just how fast the landscapes we view and the ground we stand on can change, break, vanish. In their gallery setting, these paintings evoked the dislocation of an island souvenir shop, where every piece is an original, every piece is a reproduction, every piece is authentic and false at the same time, trafficking in clichés of fantasy and romance while capturing our world being undoubtedly submerged. -Franken Berry