DC Peeporama

I took a 48 hour trip to DC last week for a board meeting. The trip was largely uneventful, aside from the fact that I got to meet up with my old friend Caroline for a very brief visit to Artomatic. Artomatic is a traveling art gallery that takes up residence in vacant buildings. While I was there, it happened to be located in Crystal City, in an office building that used to house Department of Defense workers. The Crystal City stop on the metro is only one stop away from National Airport, so Caroline and I met up before I flew out. It's so cool - basically 10 floors of art in an office building. You can still see cubicle wall outlines on the carpet, but now the space is full of installations and pieces by amateur and professional artists. Caro said that DC doesn't feel like much of an artists' town, but the number of artists showcased in the building was impressive. We made our way to the Peep dioramas, to see the competitors in the Washington Post's annual Peep diorama contest. 

The winner of the contest: Occupeep DC. A depiction of the Occupy protests in MacPherson Square in DC. Even the rider on the statue had been Peepified. The artist figured out that a Peep is 3.5% of the size of an average human, and used that proportion to do everything to scale. She included tiny sculpted rats eating garbage and actual photos of the buildings surrounding the park. 

The largest ever submission: Peepius Maximus. The lions were made out of chick Peeps and the gladiator was protecting himself with a shield made out of a kitchen cabinet knob. In the levels underneath the stadium, they had separate cells where individual Peeps were being mauled by lions and chained to the walls. 

My favorite submission: Le Tour de Peeps. The creators had Peepified all the riders' names (e.g. L. Peepheimer, Y. Peepovych) and the French advertisers. They even included a Peepified Devil, who Kyle tells me is a German bike fan who shows up every year dressed as the Devil. Just brilliant.