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."