Nayland Blake The Big One 2003 white nylon 192" x 180" x 6" [large detail of installation]

This is almost certainly going to be the last post to include an image from the December Miami shows.

I found this wonderful outsize work by Nayland Blake so irresistable - on many levels - that I had to share it. "The Big One" dominated the booth of London's Fred at PULSE.

Were the edition large enough, and if I had an extra, aircraft hanger-size bedroom and a trust fund I'd get me two of these humungous sleeping bags. One would be kept for contemporaries and posterity, museum-virginal, displayed or loaned, and the other would always be available at home when, . . . needed.

Sure it's scary [see next paragraph], but it's also damn delightful.

For anyone new to Blake, here is an excerpt from Sarah Valdez's review in Art in America of Blake's show at Matthew Marks last fall:

Bunnies and extreme physical ordeals--the two main ingredients of Nayland Blake's work--turned up again in his latest show, "Reel Around." The recent offerings also found the artist treading, typically, between the sinister and the hilarious, between the transcendent and the banal. A huge, fluffy, white rabbit suit some 16 feet in length, The Big One (2003) was sprawled out like an enormous animal-skin rug on the floor of the main gallery, doing a good job of controlling the cavernous space. The oversize costume also brought to mind other times the bunny has shown up throughout Blake's oeuvre. Though probably inscrutable to the uninitiated, Blake's lop-eared albino mascot references a range of cultural signifiers related to the artist's identity as a biracial gay man, including Brer Rabbit, Playboy, drugs and the real-life rabbit's proclivity for fucking. To those not in the loop, however, the piece may have appeared a good, soft spot to take a nap.