The Sale of the Century

Tomorrow I leave again for Pittsburgh. The estate sale at my dad's house is scheduled for Saturday and Sunday, and I think I should be there instead of two thousand miles away. In addition to taking care of my dad and trying to make art, cleaning out the house in Upper St. Clair has been one of my major preoccupations over the past year. I calculated that I have spent at least seven working weeks there -- at first throwing away old magazines (thanks to Publishers Clearinghouse) and outdated food and medicine, giving away my mother's clothes (I found over 150 pairs of shoes in the house, mostly the same color and style), clearing out the upstairs so that my dad could navigate while he was living there, then finally sorting through all of the stuff my mother accumulated conscientiously during her life, specifically during the twenty or so years they lived in the house. The volume was mind-boggling and the sorting process difficult. Every decision was one of extremes: Do I get rid of it or pay to ship it to California and store it indefinitely? I could write a lot about this, but I think for now I'll just download a few photos.

The first load of garbage (November 2004) -- we put out around 70 bags, and that was just the beginning.


Here's a bit of relief -- a beautiful late spring dusting of snow last year.

I found my toys! (Where were they when Olivia was little?)

Michael buried in chaos, just last month.

Stash of empty boxes.

Edith Abeyta and "Buried Alive"

After another day of work on "PilgrIMAGE," I returned to the gallery Thursday evening to install its cornice and to let Edith in to finish hanging her plates. "Buried Alive" is not only an installation in the gallery (one plate for each day the show is open), it is also a scavenger hunt in and around the locales Edith visits every day. Each plate is quite elegant looking in an abstract way -- and is ornamented with Edith's bitemarks. She is in the process of removing a plate and hiding it every day, then leaving visual clues in the gallery and on her blog. Here is a photo of the gallery installation on the second day of the show. Check out her blog -- edithabeyta.blogspot.com -- to watch and/or join the hunt!

Some photos of "Arroyo Seco Watershed and Surrounding Area" -- my shower curtain piece

I stopped by the gallery on Tuesday and was able to shoot a few pictures of the show. As I mentioned, we hung my shower curtain piece on Wednesday evening, on a circular rod suspended from the ceiling in the center of the exhibition space. The transparency of the curtain adds a reflective quality much like water when it is lit. I have been wanting to do something with landscape and a shower curtain for several years -- this morphed from an installation proposal that Linda and I had originally developed to be installed en plein air.

Here are some photos:

Hanging the show (continued) and Jennifer Murphy's piece

So hanging continued Wednesday evening. Michael was the first to arrive at 6:30, then Jennifer. Edith and her husband came around 7. Michael helped suspend the shower curtain piece from the ceiling with monofilament -- he measured and calculated and worked the rod around the ladder in midair, and it was exciting to see it up in the gallery for the first time. The transparent curtain actually gives the impression of water when it is hung and light moves through it. Meanwhile, I cleaned up the gallery and hung Daniel's photographs. We worked until 10:30 and then decided to come back to hang the cornice for PilgrIMAGE and to let Edith in to put finishing touches on "Buried Alive."

Jennifer installed her piece, called "Study of Natural Patterns." She set up a grid of old Thomas Guide pages upon which she superimposed leaves from native plants and sewn tracks following a pattern mapped of the internet. She copied spam "poetry" onto the leaves.


Here is her statement explaining the piece:

"Two interests converged when I combined my study of local wild plants with my ongoing collection of “spam poetry”, the odd strings of words that internet spambots create to try and outsmart your email filters. Painting these found literary bits onto plant surfaces seems to be a study in contrasts, the manmade with nature, but a deeper look muddies that distinction.

The plants evolved to live in a specific locale, Los Angeles, represented by the pages of an old Thomas guide. The poetry “lives” on the internet, a virtual, worldwide landscape of which Los Angeles is a part. Programmers have created beautiful two-dimensional representations of the one-dimensional internet. Modeling the Internet this way reveals the natural branching pattern familiar to us from trees and waterways. These networks inspired the embroidered network of arrows.

What’s amazing to me is that the plants also live in an invisible communication network. Many California native plants actually communicate through symbiotic networks of beneficial mycorrhizal fungi in the soil. These plants have co-evolved with local animals, fungi and microbes, to form a complex cooperative network of relationships. I grew up thinking “survival of the fittest” was the norm in living systems, but the plants are teaching me otherwise."

Working on PilgrIMAGE - our all-nighter

So pre-show momentum continued to build on Wednesday -- I made even more trips to JoAnn Fabrics and Staples and had the whole piece of fabric for the curtain (PilgrIMAGE) out on the dining room table during the day, and met Jennifer, Edith and her husband and Michael at the gallery in the evening to hang the rest of the work.

PilgrIMAGE, at this point, just kept growing. I needed more fabric and some kind of fringe to make the piece with and I was still choosing, scanning and printing photos and bits of text that Linda had brought. It was also becoming clear that it would take a lot of printing, ironing, sewing, stitch witchery and hours of labor to get this thing together. I never at any point was able to refine the specifics of how I wanted it to look and work toward that goal because I never found all of the materials until the last days of work. And I have never imagined myself a textile artist, so I did not have the force of vision that comes when I am working on something that comes out of my own creative imperative. But this piece seemed to need to look and act differently. It was a Hollywood piece -- busy and ornamental and about content and appearance more than process or contemplation. And it seemed to need to be a fabric piece. I was stuck making do with what JoAnn's had to offer, though I wish I had gone to one of the "serious" fabric stores over in Hollywood or downtown. But it was too late for that. So I just kept putting one foot in front of the other and trying to get it done. A lot like sorting through my mother's house, actually. Sometime I will do a post on the Pittsburgh experience.

By Friday, I knew I wouldn't be able to fabricate the piece alone. I still hadn't chosen all of the images -- in fact, I had barely accomplished laying the thing out and getting the structure set at that point. It all took an enormous amount of time, which I didn't have. Also, I really wanted to be true to Linda's vision and sensibility, and working on such a hard deadline seemed to be pushing me away from that goal. No time to mull things over, try things, feel my way to the correct choices for the piece. So I called Linda, and she came over on Friday evening to help get the thing finished. We ended up staying up until 4 a.m. -- the first all-nighter I've pulled in maybe twenty years! -- and it felt much truer to the piece to have her actively involved in making choices and putting the thing together. We listened to music and had some good conversations and kept each other going as it grew later and later. Olivia and Michael couldn't believe what was happening! I am usually asleep on the couch by 9 p.m. I ended up finishing the machine sewing on Saturday, and hung the thing with binder clips (!) at 5 -- just when the opening began. Whew! Here is the way it currently looks in the gallery. There are still some things I would change. Maybe I will if we hang it again. It is truly a collaborative piece, and I learned a lot by participating in that process.

Intimate Geography opened Saturday evening; hanging with Daniel Marlos; PilgrIMAGE -- a work in progress

It is Tuesday, and I am just now recovering from the excitement of getting the show up and hosting the opening reception at The Acorn on Saturday evening. Linda, my co-curator/co-conspirator, and I worked like dogs -- not just to get the show up but to finish our collaborative piece, PilgrIMAGE. I spent most of last week hanging the show and putting the piece together. First Daniel came into the gallery on Tuesday afternoon and we hung the quilt and chose his photographs. His colors are vivid and the graphics quite intriguing -- arrows circling throughout the quilt and moving through the three photographs, all of which were set in the neighborhood.The title of the series is "Off on a Tangent." Daniel has produced an interesting group of conceptual works over the past few years: for example, he made a series of photos of buildings in Los Angeles whose address numbers mark each year between the founding of Los Angeles and 2002. Like the photos in "Off on a Tangent," they are frequently staged with persons he knows. I also like his film about the Los Angeles River, which he shot in monthly segments on a vintage hand-cranked movie camera. He then spliced the reels sequentially, creating a black and white film which revealed nuance and subtle change in the natural movements of the river. Daniel also has a very cool website at www.whatsthatbug.com where he has photographed and identified all kinds of interesting bugs in entertaining ways.

During the rest of my free time early in the week I began to assemble the materials for PilgrIMAGE, the piece Linda and I made about her journey from her home in Cypress Park to her mother's former home in West Hollywood. It had become clear to me early on that this piece was not going to be very much like my usual work, and as the week progressed it began to reveal quite different qualities, not just in appearance but in the pace and type of production approach it required. I was on a journey myself with this piece, and as I commented to one of the other artists, it was like a road full of blind curves.