Home Depot Parking Lot (working title)

a new work in development from artist Robin Frohardt

Home Depot Parking Lot (working title) is a live-cinema performance that blends puppetry, prose, live music, and intricate handmade cardboard sets. This speculative non-fiction piece, grounded in reality yet deeply reflective, offers a poetic meditation on our relationship with the natural world.

For the past 15 years, 2024 Herb Alpert Award-winning artist Robin Frohardt (creator of The Plastic Bag Store), has lived across the street from a Home Depot parking lot. Beginning with the parking lot itself as a gateway to a deeper narrative, the resulting work operates as a treatise on box store shopping centers. It explores the internal repercussions of growing up in these “non-places” and unravels our complicated relationship with our natural environment.

Frohardt takes issue with the illusion that we stand apart from the ecosystem — the common cultural premise of man/natural dualism. We often view nature as something distant, something to fortify ourselves against.

But how can anything, even a parking lot, exist outside of the natural world? Billions of years ago, a few cells began to divide, and now there are 3,422 Home Depot locations. The ground may be paved over, and the trees milled into perfect 2x4s, but the same natural processes are at work here as anywhere else. A drip from an air conditioner wears a groove into the sidewalk just like a river carves a canyon from rock. Fauna drive here daily to gather sticks for their nests.

The story begins in a cardboard recreation of the parking lot and surrounding neighborhood. As it unfolds, it alternates between live cardboard animations and vérité footage. Live music and narration combine with low-fi practical effects and puppetry to bring the work to life.

While it’s initially amusing to think of a Home Depot park lot as a natural entity, through this thoughtful interrogation, Frohardt catalyzes a perspective shift in the viewer. When we acknowledge the inseparability of our actions from the natural world, we transition from being conquerors to becoming stewards.

Creator/ Director - Robin Frohardt
Known for her rich aesthetic and highly detailed constructions, Robin Frohardt is an award-winning theater and film director. Her narrative based films, live performance and immersive sculpture, use recognizable materials, often trash, to create richly detailed worlds with narratives that consider capitalism, and the resulting environmental catastrophe through a darkly humorous lens. Her theatrical work has earned her a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Herb Alpert Award, a Creative Capital Award and multiple Jim Henson Foundation Grants. Her play THE PIGEONING hailed by the New York Times as “a tender, fantastical symphony of the imagination,” debuted in 2013 and continues to tour at home and abroad. Her Immersive film/ theater project THE PLASTIC BAG STORE premiered in Times Square in 2020 and has since toured to major performing arts venues in Los Angeles, Chicago, Adelaide and Austin and will be open at Mass MoCA summer of 2024. Her short films have been official selections at The Telluride Film Festival and Aspen ShortsFest, where she won the Ellen Award. THE PLASTIC BAG STORE won Best International Feature at the All Living Things Film Festival and the Audience Award at the DC Environmental Film Festival.
Composer - Freddi Price
Freddi Price is a multi-disciplinary performing and recording artist, musician, multi-instrumentalist, band leader, composer, actor, and voiceover artist. Over the years he has collaborated, composed, and performed with bands, artists, and stage productions on both US coasts in addition to touring in the US and Europe with his talents and music having been featured by the likes of David Byrne, Eric Burdon, Ann Magnuson among many others on stage and on recordings. His compositions, performances, and voice have accompanied theater productions in San Francisco and New York. For his original music for Robin Frohardt’s previous NYC puppet theater piece, The Pigeoning, he was nominated for the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Music in a Play. Besides providing music for theater and some commercial work, he also performs on many instruments and voice in a variety of forms and genres, from solo to large groups, blues to rock and soul, brass band and cabaret.