Attack of the Lily Monster explores the boundary between high and low culture. I realize this boundary is arbitrary, but it's phony to pretend it doesn't exist. It reduces itself to nuance, that shade of difference in meaning between words like beauty and alluring, striking and garish, awe and fear, icon and symbol. B-movies exemplify low culture. There is a vintage 1958 B-movie called Attack of the 50 Foot Woman. It stars Allison Hayes as a woman who encounters an alien and grows to mammoth proportions. Attack of the 50 Foot Woman is one of those B-movies that's so bad it's fascinating, almost in the way a car wreck is fascinating. Really, the analogy to a car wreck is appropriate because such films, with their cheesy special effects, tacky sets, horrendous cinematography, and over-the-top performances unravel aesthetically before our eyes, offering insights into the underbelly of pop culture. By nature pop culture is manipulative, embodying our consumer-driven society; yet stripped-down, raw, it can prove almost painfully emotional, surreally honest. In 1993 Attack of the 50 Foot Woman was remade for HBO. Despite having a much larger budget and thus being vastly superior in every facet of production value, as a work of pop culture, the remake, starring Daryl Hannah, didn't even remotely measure up to the original. It took itself far too seriously. I'm not saying it wasn't entertaining, for it had some nice touches. Yet while the remake was a mildly successful highbrow satire, the original was a lowbrow camp masterpiece.
For Attack of the 50 Foot Woman to be properly remade, it would have to star Lily Peachin, whose particular brand of beauty and wit bridges the gap between highbrow and low. Her beauty is as classical as her wit is bawdy. Playing around with her image in Attack of the Lily Monster allowed me to meld these disparate qualities by combining elegant design with a splashy color scheme. I previously lost myself in Lily Peachin's image in The Essence of Lily, a fragmented animated text posted on Illumination Gallery when the site first went online in September of 2003. The 8 animations comprising Attack of the Lily Monster were sampled from a single root image. They vary in duration from just under 1 minute to nearly 5 minutes. Upon completion, they loop. A high-speed Internet connection is required.