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(bright music) (upbeat music) (soft upbeat music) (soft atmospheric music) (soft atmospheric music continues) - [Robin] More often than not when I start a project, I have no idea where it's going.

(soft atmospheric music) Usually it begins with a funny idea or a sketch and then just kind of expands from there.

This one started with a fascination with a very specific parking lot.

(soft atmospheric music) (soft atmospheric music continues) (soft piano music) For the last 17 years, I have lived across the street from the center of the universe.

Which I guess, technically speaking, is true for everyone.

My particular center is a Home Depot parking lot in Brooklyn, New York.

(soft music) (traffic whooshing) (truck rumbling) To the east of the parking lot is a high school where I have voted for three presidents.

To the north, a factory that I think just makes steam.

To the west, a can and bottle collection business that must have been a strip club at one point because the sign still says "Sexy."

That's next to the beautiful house with the scalloped shingles that burned down and was under construction for 10 years.

And when they were done, it looked like this.

That's next to the mirror and glass store and that's next to the church that never has service, which is next to the squat where the kind man and the big shotgun used to live.

And across from that is me.

(soft orchestral music) On my fire escape is an old van seat that's been there since early Obama.

From here, I have the perfect view of the parking lot and its many inhabitants.

The store employees, day laborers, men with sprinter vans hustling deliveries, contractors of all kinds.

There's a woman who sells hot lunches and tamales from colorful coolers, can and bottle collectors with carts stacked high, and there used to be a guy with a food truck with decent hamburgers and crinkle cut fries, and so many cars and trucks and scooters and school buses and e-bikes, all creating some of the most profound honking that the world has ever known.

(vehicles honking) Truly epic, Academy Award winning honking.

(vehicles honking) And every night, the lot clears and a lone parking lot Zamboni thing washes it all away.

(soft atmospheric music) (soft atmospheric music) (Zamboni whirring) Has this place always been so nuts?

Like are there just some unseen energetic lines that intersect here underground?

Or is it all just like cartoon bones and drippy pipes down there?

(soft atmospheric music) (water dripping) Or is underneath this Home Depot parking lot just another Home Depot parking lot and it's just Home Depot parking lots all the way down?

I contemplate this while staring at my lake view.

That's what I call it.

It started as a puddle on the roof of the mirror and glass store, maybe around 2011.

The puddle grew and grew every time it rained.

It froze in the winter and thawed in the summer.

At one point, someone put sandbags in the middle to disperse the water, I guess, but the bags split and tall grasses grew from the sand, creating a beautiful grassy island.

Over time, I've developed several theories about the lake.

One, it's some sort of entity, a thing that grants wishes, and if you stare at it long enough and smoke enough cigarettes, it will know your deepest desire.

Theory two.

Though, the lake has stopped expanding, it is growing downwards, and it's as deep as the planet is thick, and if you were to dive in from the fire escape, you would surface just off the coast of Perth, according to Google Maps.

(boat horn blares) (water splashing) (bird cawing) My third theory is that because the lake is like a mirror reflecting the sky, I imagine these are the kind of mirrors sold inside, lake mirrors for sky reflecting only.

Which reminds me of a story I once heard about a flock of migratory birds that were traveling across the Midwest.

(birds honking) From the sky, the illuminated parking lot of a Walmart looked like light reflecting off the surface of a lake.

Hundreds of birds came in hard, expecting the cool soft surface of the water.

But instead, crash landed on the asphalt.

This probably happens all the time, considering how many parking lots there are.

I think this story really stuck with me because I come from the land of giant shopping center parking lots.

Growing up in a place like these has left me with a kind of shame, like there was something missing from me to be born in such a non place.

(soft somber music) I guess that's why sometimes I can't help but feel embarrassed in a forest.

(birds tweeting) (soft somber music) Nature's intrusions here can read like sad neglect.

Roots breaking sidewalks, wind shredding tarps, a drip from an air conditioner wearing a hole in the sidewalk, a slow growing lake on the roof of a mirror and glass store.

But it seems like perfect order to me.

Though the flora has been paved out, it's creeping back in through the cracks, and this place is literally teeming with fauna, some gathering sticks for their nests.

Somehow it's the most natural place in the world.

How could it not be?

Billions of years ago, some cells started to divide, and now we have 1,344 T.J.

Maxx locations.

This is what the center of the universe is doing right here.

It's parking lotting, it's selling tamales.

It's honking, loudly, perfectly.

It's falling apart as if anything ever could.

Here's what actually happened to the lake.

They tore the building down in about a week and they started digging, past the cartoon bones and the drippy pipes, and then they stopped and it rained.

(soft somber music) (rain whooshing) And the lake returned and it began to grow and I imagined it growing past the church with no service, past the squat with the nice man and the big shotgun, past the sexy recyclers, past the factory that makes steam, and the school where we vote, and it fills up the parking lot and the birds will finally have a soft place to land.

(birds honking) (soft somber music) (somber music fades) (soft atmospheric music) (soft atmospheric music continues) (car beeps) For as long as I've been living here, I've wanted to make an art project about this Home Depot.

As far as parking lots go, it's pretty interesting.

If you've ever built anything in Brooklyn, you know this Home Depot.

There's a lot going on here.

A network of people and micro-economies.

(car horn honks) (birds tweeting) And I'm always seeing birds here, crash landed or otherwise.

(birds tweeting) It's so strange being in the parking lot after working on the drawings.

These random buildings take on a certain kind of mythology.

(soft atmospheric music) I didn't even really know how the animation was gonna end until they started tearing down the mirror and glass store while I was drawing.

And it felt kind of sad, which is strange, because I know not a soul that ever went in there.

The awning falling in particular felt kind of profound.

And then there was a couple hours where they couldn't really figure out what to do with this tree.

(soft atmospheric music) This neighborhood is a sort of in between place.

Part industrial, part residential.

Several neighborhoods with actual names intersect here, but as far as I can tell, this neighborhood is just called by the Home Depot or by HoDo for short.

Okay, just kidding, nobody actually calls it that, but I thought maybe we could get that going.

It's a nonsensical patchwork.

New condos next to industrial storage, single family homes squeezed between tool rental businesses, an almond processing facility next to a children's clothing store, fake columns and fire escapes to nowhere.

It wasn't planned or designed.

It's a series of overlapping choices, patches, and fixes.

I can see most of it from my fire escape, which is slowly turning into lace.

Beautiful but terrifying.

I had some succulents here for many years, but someone stole them.

There's a certain kind of sting from stolen plants.

All that effort and time gone, the years I spent not watering them.

I live in what used to be an old feather processing facility.

The big rusty metal feather fluffing hopper things are still here.

Some punks stole a Ronald McDonald head and put it on one of the hoppers during the blackout of 2003, but it blew away during Hurricane Sandy.

I wonder where he is now.

On humid days, the floorboards still smell of the oils from the feathers.

That's why we call it the Chicken Hut.

Everyone thinks it's the turtle tank.

It's not the turtle tank.

We used to have wild parties here, a long, long time ago, but the evidence is still here.

Like the neighborhood, this place too is a layered series of choices, patches, and people.

Something you could never plan.

It's a collage of remnants from previous roommates, ghosts of projects, and ghosts of friends.

(soft upbeat music) There are artifacts of adaptation, layers of function, failure, and forgotten art.

(soft upbeat music) It was not designed.

It just became.

(soft upbeat music) (soft upbeat music continues) I like the very specificness of this place (soft upbeat music) because I come from somewhere that could be anywhere, just one parking lot after another, after another, after another.

(soft upbeat music) I was raised in a midsize city smack in the middle of a square state, a place composed entirely of military bases, evangelical megachurches, and shopping centers from every decade, from the quaint 1960s mini malls to the box store monstrosities that house the titans of mass production, like Kohl's, Best Buy, Michaels, Home Goods.

This could be anywhere, which means it's actually nowhere.

It's a blank space pretending to be full.

A shopping center doesn't evolve like a neighborhood or a chicken hut.

It arrives fully formed like a big dumb beige spaceship.

Growing up here left me with a kind of grief.

I felt like I had been robbed of something authentic.

I longed for anything with history and depth and complication.

In this endless expanse of taupe and tan, how can anyone feel anything but dehydrated?

Life is on hold here.

Life is what happens in the moments before and after here, but never here.

One could never fall in love amongst so much fake sandstone and wood chips.

You would never say, "Run away with me to parking lot island and we will begin again."

I am constantly trying to reconcile the predicament of being born a soul in a body, but raised in a Walmart.

I began shooting parking lots, trying to find something beautiful.

(soft upbeat music) (soft upbeat music continues) And I kept being drawn to the cracks and the weathering and the imperfections.

Maybe because these spaces are designed to be so uniform and inoffensive that they only become interesting when they're falling apart.

(soft upbeat music) (no audio) (soft atmospheric music) This parking lot fascination is what led me to the drawings, which became the animation.

I've been told I have a knack for taking a simple premise to an elaborate realization, which is actually just a nice way of saying that I can take a joke too far.

I kind of can't help it.

So I began to recreate the animation in cardboard.

(whimsical upbeat music) (whimsical upbeat music continues) (whimsical upbeat music continues) (whimsical upbeat music continues) (whimsical upbeat music continues) (whimsical upbeat music continues) (whimsical upbeat music continues) (whimsical upbeat music continues) (soft music) I love filming my cardboard creations.

I love the idea of making something so epic from something simple.

I've made many cardboard movies, but now I'm attempting to make one live on stage with the help of some of my favorite people.

Combining my love for theater and animation and film into a take a joke too far performance called, "Shopping Center of the Universe."

If you can't tell, I'm obsessed with process.

That's why I'm using all these mediums to try to investigate or communicate this feeling of being a non person from a non place.

Maybe if I can frame the parking lot as a natural occurring phenomenon, I can feel like a natural creature.

Maybe I'm doing nature right now.

(soft music) I guess this is all just one process unfolding and I am a part of it.

(soft orchestral music) (soft orchestral music continues) Maybe if I photograph it, maybe if I draw the photograph, maybe if I animate the drawing, maybe if I build the drawing from cardboard, maybe if I animate the cardboard, maybe if I film the animation of the cardboard version of the drawing of the photograph, maybe if I take that film and I perform it live on stage, I can understand the true nature of a forest (soft orchestral music) or a tree (soft orchestral music) or a Home Depot parking lot in Brooklyn, New York.

(soft orchestral music) (soft city ambiance) (soft city ambiance continues)