LILY PRILLINGER
Thrill Rides, 1999
Oil on canvas, (various sizes)

"Bridled Euphoria"

The Amusement Park, a peculiar quarantine, sustains a calculated psychodrama. Heady vapors inebriate each grotto-of-thrills. The Midway channels the low, constant din of humming motors. A landscape of bridled euphoria, the Amusement Park unleashes its sprawl. Its splendor and squalor map a delirious clamor. The structures themselves -- roller-coasters, Ferris wheels, scramblers, and other anthropomorphic obscurities -- are spectacular and gargantuan. Taut, elaborate engineering serves but a bawdy, meandering function: the Thrill Ride.

Fairground attractions, as they are titled, often allude to fierce acts of nature -- the typhoon, the hurricane, the tsunami. But instead of dispensing the ruin of their capricious, omnipotent namesakes, these rides oscillate and toss with predictable harmlessness. Their duration is a tamed exertion. Occasionally, raw physics escapes from the man-made snare of simple machines. Riders may be hurled into oblivion. One boards these rides with simple intentions; to experience the largesse of titanic sensation. While thrills may be assured, decapitation, truncation, death plunges, too, offer splinters of probability with every ticket sold. These machines grind and deliver. The twinned promise of delight and terror is spun from their metallic shred. Summer waves its long, moonlit arm. Its seasonal wand passes over the park, preserving its glittering, architectural carcass.