Eteri Chkadua

Alien Bloom represents the fictional Alien Garden with a view of a hallucinatory landscape created with Alien shaped sculptural flora. it is a post-industrial landscape, constructed from disposable plastic containers collected from neighborhoods in different cities around the world. The idea for this project was conceived  by Eteri and Gocha Chkadua while visiting their native city Tbilisi in Georgia.  At the time there were no laws on recycling. They urged  their neighbors to bring their plastic containers instead of throwing them away. Thus, in 2010, the first Alien Bloom installation My Yard  was created  and it turned into an ongoing project.  My Yard  was displayed at the Karvasla National Museum in Tbilisi, Georgia. Following years they created  installation series, titled: Colors Insulting To Nature (displayed in NYC and Lido, Italy), Bloom On The Edge (Kingston, Jamaica), Brooklyn Nights (Brooklyn), Alien Bloom (East Hampton and NYC), Bloom In The Black Light  (Bed Stuy, Brooklyn).

The images of Alien Bloom sculptural flora along with the paintings created by Eteri Chkadua for this project, will  illustrate her upcoming project, a feature-documentary film Alien Bloom. The subject of the film is a psychological journey of the artist herself, as the first generation of Georgian emigrant, who questions and investigates how emigration affects perception of  place and belonging and explores themes of  nostalgia, memory, fantasy and displacement.

Alien Bloom aims to  generate inquiry about the environment, humanity and sustainability in addition to providing a place, both real and imagined, for the cast-away.