In the summer of 2005 I built a toy oceanliner called the ToyGantic, it was conceived to be a sort of atomic-age Americanized toy version of the historic Titanic (it’s over 8 feet in length). I have for many years been fascinated by the number of toy ships that must be strewn across the bottoms of ponds and lakes all over the world. I wanted to have the experience of finding one of the rarest and most unusual ever made so I created the opportunity and enacted it. I sank the ToyGantic in a private pond near Rockland, Maine in August of 2005 and raised it in July of 2006. Over the course of the year that it lay on the pond bottom, I created a fictive historical narrative and some related ephemera to explain its origins, and the reason for its demise. As I dealt with the conceptual nature of this work it became a much more complex endeavor than I had originally imagined.

Collection of the Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art at Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS.