Artist, Polly Apfelbaum: My name is Polly Apfelbaum, I live and work in New York City.
You're looking at a large scale installation, made up of a lot of pieces of material. Its name is Blossom, and it's one of the Powerpuff Girls.
The (Laughs) Powerpuff Girls are a cartoon show, and they're superheroes. Their mission is to fight crime and save the world before bedtime. Each one has a kind of stereotypical personality of their hair color. This piece was based on Blossom, who's the leader, who is a redhead.
It starts in the center with yellow, ends with black. There are 104 colors in this system of dye that I use, and to get it to be a redhead, and to get it to kind of bounce, I dyed red around the main colors. So that it really gives it the sense of floating I hand cut and hand dye everything, and there's a white border around the form. It's almost like a hand form, almost like a leaf that fits into the puzzle.
(Laughs) I think my work is cheap magic, because it's not natural. It's all synthetic fabric. It has this kind of iridescent quality to it.
To walk around the piece is really important. And then it really shimmers. It levitates like a Powerpuff Girl, you know, to kind of fly.
I was really excited that there was a new role model for little girls. They had their own cartoon, and I thought it was about time. (Laughs) They look kind of like Japanimation, but they also look like the early American cartooning too. The interesting thing about cartoons, is, if you look below the surface, there's a lot going on.
I use a squeeze bottle, and I squeeze first the middle color, and then what I do is take the other squeeze bottle, which has the red, and dab it. And where I dab, it makes a mark. And if you look closely at the piece, there's like double dots in it. So that's where I've touched the fabric.
Then I cut out everything, and leave that quarter inch border. Because it really gives it a sharper edge, and that helps in the flying, (Laughs), in the levitating.
I hand install the piece, and each time it's different. But basically the piece is from light to dark, and it's a spiral of color. One of the parts of the work that I love is the kind of coming in and making it in a space. It's kind of reinventing the piece.