Orangeland: Pugman Painting

Pugman loved his pugs more than anything. They were his only family. For years, he slept in the same flea-infested, fetid bed with them inside his pink vinyl-sided mobile home nestled between a pawn shop and a Dunkin' Donuts on U.S. 19. One day, he ate Drano. The dogs fed off his bloated, lifeless body for nine days before the neighbors discovered his half-eaten corpse. Orangeland is a metaphor for the Florida that is not advertised in travel brochures or experienced by tourists visiting attractions, beaches and theme parks. It represents the Florida of the exploited and their exploiters, the Florida of human predators and prey. Orangeland examines the situations of the desperate, con-artists, feeble-minded, and elderly as they attempt to navigate the merciless backwaters of a peninsula that lures the gullible with the promise of a sunny, carefree, tropical paradise.