Future Studio and Chicken Boy

Amy Inouye and Stuart Rapeport host Future Studio in their live-work loft. Stuart is an artist who paints, draws, and makes interesting dog sculptures from reclaimed wood. Among other things, Amy is a talented graphic designer, a lover of pugs and Chicken Boy ("too weird to die"), and a collector of just about anything from funky lamps to Dodger Stadium seats. She also operates a gift shop on the premises (see photo) that stocks items ranging from Chicken Boy memorabilia to snow globes to rubber duckies in the image of James Brown. If you want to find out more about Amy's projects you can navigate directly to her Chicken Boy website from the links section of this blog.

A few of my favorite baby pictures from the project

Here are a few of the pictures of me that my grandfather took. I had not seen these in several decades.




This is the caption that we posted on the wall next to the installation:

"Porte bonheur means 'good luck charm' in French. In cleaning out my parents’ house I was lucky to find a collection of slides taken of me by my grandfather, Joseph Thomas, a gifted amateur photographer. I was my parents’ first and only child and my grandparents’ first grandchild. As these photos attest, during my early childhood I was fortunate enough to have been very much adored. Granddaddy and I got along famously and I remember enjoying it as a little girl when he brought out the camera or the slide projector to take pictures or show slides on Sunday evening. Granddaddy later gave me his slide projector and his prized Exacta SLR, used to shoot these slides. I still have the projector and the camera and I am lucky to have rediscovered the slides. I am even luckier to have had such a nice grandfather."

Gallery photos from Estate of Mind

Here are some of the photos I took at the opening party for "Estate of Mind." Suzanne Siegel's assemblages created from lingerie and personal items belonging to her mother formed a grouping inside the door to Future Studio, Amy Inouye's live-work space at 5558 Figueroa in Highland Park.


At the far end of the gallery area, Beth Elliott's sculptures, braided from shredded paper collected from her parents' documents and mail, carry the corner marked by the magenta wall.



My installation, consisting of a collection of "preemie" sized cloth diapers printed with a series of baby pictures of me taken by my grandfather, was located between the two.


Some smaller pieces by Beth and Suzanne were also placed around the gallery.



The kitchen featured quite a spread, including Beth's collection of cakes, baked in a mold of her face (lower right).


Here is Beth, photographing her handiwork.



The show will be up through November 4 -- contact either me or Amy Inouye at Future Studio, 5558 N. Figueroa in Highland Park, to make arrangements to see it (Amy can be reached at 323 254-4565 or amy@futurestudio.com).

Mrs. O'Rourke's gingerbread recipe

"Estate of Mind" opened Saturday night at Future Studio -- we had a good crowd and the art was well received. In addition to the art on the wall, however, we also put together quite a spread of refreshments in the kitchen. In honor of the occasion, Suzanne, Beth and I decided to make recipes we had gotten from our families. Choosing to avoid the whole issue of 50s and 60s suburban cooking and various strange recipes we encountered as children (for example, Beth revealed that she has a vintage WeightWatchers recipe for chocolate jello that her mother often made), I decided to jump back a generation and bring gingerbread from a recipe I got from my paternal grandmother, Jeane Crawford Thomas. The funny thing about sharing a recipe from Grandmother is that although she got meals on the table for her family for years, she never liked to cook. In fact, Grandmother thought housework was a demeaning activity for any woman with a brain. Her creative solution to the problem of having to cook for her family in any case, was to become as efficient as possible at it. This recipe that she got from her neighbor, Mrs. O'Rourke, in New Brighton, Pennsylvania, wins over mid-century boxed mixes, hands down. It is both easy to make and uses simple ingredients that would have been stocked in any early twentieth-century kitchen. Here is the recipe, plus a photo of my grandmother at her sink.

MRS. O'ROURKE'S GINGERBREAD (from JEANE CRAWFORD THOMAS)

1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup shortening (butter can be substituted)
1 cup black strap molasses
2 eggs, beaten
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon cloves
1 teaspoon ginger
2 1/2 cups flour
2 teaspoons baking soda dissolved in 1 cup boiling water (do this at the last minute)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Cream sugar and shortening. Combine with eggs and molasses and beat well. Sift flour with dry ingredients and add to egg mixture. Dissolve baking soda in the boiling water and add to batter. Mix thoroughly (by hand) and pour into a greased, square baking pan. Bake 25 minutes. Cut into cake-like squares when cool and serve with whipped heavy cream, if desired.

Press release, "Estate of Mind"

Future Studio Gallery presents:

ESTATE OF MIND

art created by Beth Elliott, Suzanne Siegel and Deborah Thomas
using things belonging to their parents’ estates
curated by Deborah Thomas

October 14 – November 4, 2006
Reception Saturday, October 14, 6 – 10 pm

Calendar Listing: ART – “Estate of Mind” – art created by Beth Elliott, Suzanne Siegel and Deborah Thomas using things belonging to their parents’ estates, curated by Deborah Thomas. Future Studio Gallery, 5558 N. Figueroa Street, Highland Park, October 14 – November 4. Opening Saturday, October 14, 6 – 10 pm. By appointment: (323) 254-4565 or amy@futurestudio.com
Who: Artists Beth Elliott, Suzanne Siegel, Deborah Thomas; curated by Deborah Thomas
What: “Estate of Mind” – art created by Beth Elliott, Suzanne Siegel and Deborah Thomas using things belonging to their parents’ estates
Where: Future Studio Gallery, 5558 N. Figueroa Street, Highland Park, 90042
When: October 14 – November 4, opening reception Saturday, October 14, 6 – 10 pm (by appointment after opening – 323 254-4565)
For information: 323 254-4565 or amy@futurestudio.com


What do you do when your parents get old and turn the tables on you, needing time and care? In addition to taking on their parents’ immediate needs, the three artists whose work is represented in “Estate of Mind,” curated by Deborah Thomas at Future Studio Gallery, make art. Artists Beth Elliott, Suzanne Siegel, and Deborah Thomas have fabricated sculpture, assemblages and installations which are both directly reminiscent of their personal family experiences and, as Elliott puts it, universal “messages from the past moving into the future.”

Suzanne Siegel’s assemblages, created from her mother’s 50s-era lingerie as well as natural objects and domestic artifacts ranging from rose petals to razor blades, carry implicit social commentary and bittersweet emotion. Ordinary items are delicately modified in ways that embody a material vision both whimsical and surreal. Siegel approaches these remains of her mother’s wardrobe as a language to be interpreted; her pieces communicate longing, secrecy and loss reflective of her mother’s personal history. As an artist, Siegel finds it crucial to interpret and contextualize what she reads and engages with in these items of apparel as common to the ordinary experience of many other women and part of a larger socio-cultural picture.

Deborah Thomas finds herself compelled to “time travel” into her family’s past, as she puts it, by working conceptually with family photographs and slides found while cleaning out her parents’ house. Her work is motivated by a desire to re-visit family relationships she remembers from childhood. After selecting images that resonate intimately for her, she maps out formal groupings according to patterns and repetitions only marginally related to any information the photos might convey. What results is a shift in emphasis away from any particular personal content or affect attached to the images to a more suggestive and universal zone of perception neither purely representational nor non-representational.

Beth Elliott, who describes her work as “destruction and creation,” relies on visceral process to cope with the shredded personal papers and junk mail addressed to her parents that continues to arrive in her mailbox. In order to make a universal statement, she shreds and braids the paper into irregular sculptural forms that are dynamic in their materiality yet restrained by means of her hands-on engagement with the paper discards. She produces organic shapes that reveal pre-logical formal qualities as well as an unexpected randomness or lightness of being.

Through their work, each of these artists moves between evocative past and ordered present, transforming highly personal reactions into universally resonant visions of life.

“Estate of Mind” at Future Studio Gallery, 5558 N. Figueroa Street, Highland Park 90042. Reception: Saturday, October 14, 6 – 10 p.m. (part of NELA Second Saturday art walk). Open by appointment (323 254-4565 or amy@futurestudio.com).

Countdown until Estate of Mind

I'm starting to feel back on track again -- my camera is back from the shop and the router is repaired after giving me a week of not being able to go online from my computer. I am working some more on "Estate of Mind." Here is one of the photos I've found. All of the slides are glass-mounted (by hand, by my grandfather) -- trays of them were stored in lovely little leather and fabric boxes. The colors just glow. I am planning an installation of about a dozen or more of them, but I won't say anything more at this point. Amy designed a very attractive card, too.

Estate of Mind - starting work

I am starting to work on my next show, called "Estate of Mind" -- it will open at Amy Inouye's loft/gallery called Future Studio in Highland Park on Saturday evening, October 14 during the Second Saturday art walk. This show will include some of my work incorporating photos I found while cleaning out the house in Pittsburgh and also work by two other artists, Beth Elliott and Suzanne Siegel. Beth has made sculpture out of papers and magazines from her parents' estate and Suzanne has created a series of assemblages using her mother's vintage lingerie and other items. I am enjoying curating as well as thinking about my own new work. My camera is back in the shop at the moment, but I will start adding photos as soon as it comes back.

Right now I am looking at slides taken by my grandfather during the 50s, and I am thinking about ways to incorporate his photos into the work. Interestingly enough, the first slide I looked at was of the LA River, taken right around Elysian Park from the train. He and my grandmother traveled to California from Pennsylvania on the train every Christmas to visit my aunt and her family. Many of his photos were close-ups of flowers. There are also some interesting posed shots of my grandmother and other family members. Looking at these photos is almost like time traveling.

Just back from Mendocino

Well, my finger has recovered (mostly), but the camera had a relapse. No way to photograph anything during our vacation to Mendocino County last week. So I am writing now sans photo embellishments. Don't know what is going on with the camera -- it acts as if the lens cap is on even when it isn't. So -- I got only a few photos in one of the most beautiful places in the world, and those are on two disposable cameras. It was almost pointless to shoot anything without my Nikon (I especially missed the zoom function), so Olivia took most of the pictures. I felt quite incapacitated without experiencing my usual look-and-photograph response to intriguing places and natural settings. Haven't traveled without a camera since I can remember. An interesting, if frustrating exercise. But I think detaching from my own visual process at least once may be beneficial in the long run.

During our trip we first visited Michael's sister, Theresa, who just rebuilt her house in Oakland -- her contractor basically recreated a 1920s-style house, even to the level of craftsmanship and handwork applied to the task. They added a second storey with two bedrooms, a second bath, and a reading alcove, and it is just beautiful.

After visiting Theresa, we continued to drive north through Napa and Sonoma, then on to Cloverdale, where we broke off the 101 (highway) and headed through the Anderson Valley to the coast. The Anderson Valley is beautiful, rolling farmland -- vineyards, orchards, tiny towns and exquisite hilly landscape. At this time of year the hills were the golden color of dry grass contrasted by the deep greenery of oak trees and vines. The air had a warm, fresh smell from the grass. There was barely a village along the way, but we spent two nights in Philo, a tiny town just east of the beginnings of the redwood forest at Navarro. Then we meandered north along the coast through Mendocino and Fort Bragg to Westport (the last tiny town on the coast) and the Howard Creek Ranch, five miles or so beyond. We stayed there in a ranch-style bed and breakfast -- the owner has hand-built redwood-paneled guestrooms in the 130-year-old antiques-filled house and barn, 300 yards from the deserted beach. The quiet was restorative -- the soft grayness near the water during foggy mornings was especially conducive to contemplation and relaxation. It was hard to come back.



Olivia is in great spirits -- she had two trail rides on the beach: one with me (a group ride, Western-saddled walk/trot type of thing, which was as much as I could manage) and one on her own with a guide. The second ride was like a dream come true for her -- she and her guide took Arabian horses 20 miles up and down the beach for three hours, galloping and walking in endurance-riding fashion. She is still tired but blissful.

I am coming gradually back to earth in Southern California.

Greetings@#$%^

I haven't been able to add much for the past few weeks -- things have skidded to a halt because I am doubly incapacitated. Both my finger and my camera are broken. So -- typing is modified hunt and peck and there are no new pictures! In spite of these drawbacks, the driveway is almost finished -- a very nice pea gravel that crunches underfoot -- and we have slipped into more of a summer schedule. The house in Pittsburgh is being repainted. I am on jury duty. Olivia is home -- at least when she isn't out with her friends.

Here is a picture of my broken finger:

"Made in Los Angeles" - by Linda Anne Hoag

Los Angeles offers me back to myself
like a pupu platter at Don the Beachcomber,
enrobes me in succulent fat, rumaki style,
my spare rib Eve to her Adam.

Newly minted I prowl down Hollywood Boulevard
shop windows mirror me, decades loop and fold:
there, in Frederick's, a grave girl in a navy blue uniform
stares at garter belts and marabou mules,
in Larry Edmunds, cinematic synesthesia
sight of patchouli, smell of paisley.

Los Angeles is my family album
Cross Roads of the World slips photo corners
around my first kiss, at St. Thomas Episcopal,
a snapshot of an angel child with cardboard wings
tilts rakishly on an ink black page.

Los Angeles is my jewelry box
whose trays slip effortlessly over the drawers below.
At Crescent Heights, old Route 66, I open today's door
am deafened by the Starwood, shocked by risque puppets.
I slide into the Carmel movie theatre to sob at Old Yeller,
land at Vangie's Cafe, just in time
to fill the ketchup bottles at the end of my shift.

Los Angeles is my book of days
my pages so interleaved with hers
that we write over and over each other
a tale with a trick ending that fools us every time.

(For more on the Keep-a-Breast Silent Auction at the Acorn Gallery, see Edith Abeyta's blog, link at right.)

Jay took this picture of me --

I really like the photo -- especially the lighting -- yet I can read in my face how much had been going on in Pittsburgh the week before.

Jay is Jay Kevoian, a good friend of Linda's.

Taking down Intimate Geography

I just downloaded a couple of photos from the day we took down Intimate Geography. Here are Edith and Jennifer having a moment.


And here is a shot I took from the parking lot behind Avenue 50.

An interesting book and other distractions

Now that the show is down and the estate sale is over, I am finding other things to get involved with. An interesting book, to start with -- Landscape and Power edited by W.J.T. Mitchell, a collection of essays considering the relationship between landscape and its cultural/political context. I really enjoyed working on the shower curtain piece and I want to continue to consider related questions. On the home front, I interviewed a holistic gardener today to begin work on the yard. Driveway unfinished, front yard out of control, back yard a blank slate (the polite way of saying it). Still playing around with the storage unit and its contents, too. My goal is to sort things out a bit and get back to a bit of simplicity around here.

The Great Unbinding, or Deconstructing Nanny

It is now ten days since I returned from Pittsburgh and the estate sale. What a process. Rosemary Dingle, an English lady with a troop of assistants, took over the sale and did a marvelous job at managing the chaos. "Full to overflowing" were her words for the house and its contents to be sold, even after I had cleared out all of the drawers and closets upstairs! Even though the sale went very well, as estate sales go, and I had no real second-thoughts about what I kept and what I got rid of, the experience was excruciating. I sat in the neighbors' kitchen most of the time and watched items pour out of the house -- furniture into trucks, afghans over shoulders, bags and bags of who knows what going who knows where. People were lined up all the way down the driveway and into the street by 7:30 a.m., waiting to be let in. Cars came and went and were parked for blocks around the otherwise sleepy neighborhood. One of the neighbors estimated that five hundred people went through the house, just the first day of the sale. Then many people came back on Sunday for another round. There were still things (mostly knicknacks) left at the end of the sale. Two thoughts hit me: one, the strangeness of seeing things go away that I had known my whole life; and two, how unpredictable it was to discover which objects held associations or memories. Neither of these qualities were in any way related to usefulness or attractiveness. Because I had been so deliberate and so thorough in sorting and thinking about the deacquisition process, I wasn't emotionally bothered by the "letting go" of things until I walked in after the last day of the sale and saw what hadn't sold, and what a mess it had all become. But the process continued, and the next person on the great chain of deacquistion quickly arrived, and his assistants loaded the rest of the stuff either onto a truck to go to flea markets or charity, or into garbage bags to be picked up at the curb. Now the house is empty. My attention has shifted to Public Storage here in Pasadena (where the movers delivered the things we chose to keep), and to the stacks of papers, photos and miscellaneous stuff piling up all over the house that I still need to organize. Our own house has been neglected for a year and a half due to the magnitude of dealing with the Pittsburgh house and I am now hoping to get the focus back to the present, and our surroundings back to simplicity.

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.