I will say I don't think I have ever seen so much love for manatees and mermaids and that was pretty incredible.
I started my search for kitsch at the Weekiwachee preserve thinking they may have a visitor center or something that may help with visual research but after walking down the path for about a mile I turned back and decided to go to Weekiwachee directly.
Apparently dinosaur themes are really big down in that area of Florida. I passed three or four giant dinosaur looking objects.
I had never been to Weekiwachee before and it was certainly an experience. It was like a really bad dream involving renaissance sculpture--Or what it might be like if the Renaissance had a spring cleaning.
It never ceases to amaze me how people attempt to merge winter holidays with the beach.
Here's a poster for the mermaid show.
Giant igloos made of milk jugs. Talk about an interesting use for recycling plastic in a public setting.
What snowmen and block letters have to do with mermaids I will never know.
I was actually drawn to these mermaid tails/fins as interesting fabric objects for embedding a pressure or bend sensor within. Thinking further about this character it could be interesting to create some kind of a beach kitsch shrine and really go all out with embodying this character of kitsch, imagined further as a merman and different functions are triggered by the waving of the mermaid tail interacting with the pressure sensor.
The throne was a little much but it does give ideas visually for a "kitsch shrine"
I stopped at several tourist shops and felt I was lucky to find this gem of technology and kitsch. I'm not exactly sure how the shirts work but somehow they absorb uv light from what appears to be this blacklight box and then turn to color. I'm not certain what applications this may have to art making but I thought it fit in nicely with doing research on kitsch and technology intersecting.
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