EFFECTS OF PLANTING TOO DEEP is an experimental media collaboration between artists Rachel Siegel and Caroline Koebel conceived out of their discovery of New York State’s former glory as the apple empire. Both within the state and globally, apples have a long history rich in symbolism and narrative import, including such associations as apple bobbing and other games, the Moon Goddess, fertility rituals, forbidden fruit, and dream states. It is precisely this nature of the fruit—the production of multiple and contemporaneous significations—that catches the artists’ fancy. With a believed origin in the region now called Kazakhstan, the apple has traveled far and wide, and has been adopted into the native customs and folklore of many lands. In the mid-1800s the Fox sisters, living near Rochester, New York, developed the amusement of scaring their widowed mother by tying apples to strings and bouncing them off of the floor and against doors (called "apple rapping"). The sister’s pranks yielded the eruption of Spiritualism, the movement based on the belief of communications between the living and the dead. Effects of Planting Too Deep is a twenty-first century experiment in apple rapping, a truth learned by the artists only once their own pranks were in full swing. The project features two women in the performance of personas roaming between Medieval mysticism, 19th-century carnivalesque, and 20th-century camp. Through nonlinear structure and interlacing of vignettes with far-ranging references and allusions, the collaborators seek to excite their audience into a wildly subjective play of associations.
Rachel J. Siegel & Caroline Koebel
2/15/03