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.