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.

I just sold a painting!

Kathy Gallegos just brought over a nice woman who had seen a copy of the "Internal Contrasts" card over at Chico's, the little Mexican restaurant on Avenue 50 and Figueroa. The owner liked the card and had put it under the glass on one of the tables, where Cristina saw it and liked my work. Nice to have follow-up four months after a show! A pleasure to sell work this way. The piece is called "untitled (terra cotta)" -- acrylic on spun polyester.

"Intimate Geography" card and artists

The cards for the show just came back from the printer! We open in two weeks. I have enjoyed working on this show, and I really like the work of all the artists who are participating. Here is the text of the press release describing it:

“Intimate Geography – Getting To Know a Place,” a group show curated by Deborah Thomas and Linda Anne Hoag, offers a collection of imaginative and personal perspectives on how one relates to a particular locale. One goal of the show, which was germinated during a series of conversations between Thomas and Hoag about landscape painting and mapmaking, is to strip away assumptions and conventions about how people locate themselves. The invited artists share a willingness to explore one-of-a-kind encounters with specific locations. Each offers a unique vision:

Edith Abeyta invites viewers into an arrestingly literal archeological scenario by constructing a fanciful neighborhood scavenger hunt in which she fabricates, hides, and maps the locations of small, earthenware plates bearing a bitten imprint of her mouth and teeth.

Daniel Marlos similarly engages the theme of navigation through space in his project “Off on a Tangent” by means of an attractive mix of the conceptual and the personal. A photographer and quiltmaker, Marlos locates and records the appearance of arrows, commonly found in the signage along his usual route to work. His subliminal purpose, however, is to play with directionality in photographic streetscapes, in the gallery, and – in a revealingly tangential yet intimate moment – in the design of a colorful and intricately crafted handmade quilt.

Thomas and Hoag’s piece “Pilgrimage” also maps a personal journey, this time from a cognitive perspective. The organizing thread of this memory map of Los Angeles was dictated by the route Hoag took as she set out to revisit particular locations of past significance during a planned, day-long walk from her current home in Cypress Park to the house where she grew up in West Hollywood. Fragments of maps, old photographs, personal text and miscellaneous memorabilia juxtaposed in the piece reconstruct Hoag’s childhood; recollections of the past were triggered by hints revealed on city streets as they exist today.

Shifting the focus from the personal to the environmental, works by Jennifer Murphy and Deborah Thomas engage viewers to consider the impact of contradictions between nature and technology. Murphy designed a virtual quilt by painting spam phrases – the meaningless yet sometimes poetic linguistic garble that subverts cyber-mapping by slipping through e-mail filtering systems – on leaves gathered locally. Thomas’s shower curtain covered with minute landscape photographs taken in and around the Arroyo Seco water table engages the viewer both to look closely and intimately at the images and to consider questions of water rights in local and personal contexts.

In celebration of Earth Day of April 22, poets Laurel Ann Bogen, Jerry Garcia and Linda Anne Hoag and the musical trio Texere will also read and perform at the gallery at 7 p.m. Bogen, Garcia and Hoag are Los Angeles poets who, in the words of Hoag, “share a lineage” and whose work often considers and engages with the place they live. Texere (from the Latin, meaning “to weave, to twine together, to compose”) is a group of three women composers from Northeast Los Angeles who weave together traditional and original music to create a rich aural tapestry of strings and voices.

Free to the public. Details available at info@ArroyoArtsCollective.org or call 626 794-3627.

The Acorn Gallery is located at 135 N. Avenue 50 in Highland Park, between Figueroa Street and the Gold Line tracks. From downtown Los Angeles, take the 110 Freeway (Avenue 53 exit, then left on Figueroa). From the Valleys, exit the 134 Freeway at Figueroa going south, then turn right on Avenue 50. Street parking.

Matrilineage and family archeology

Now that I have a blog, I can document a few projects already completed as well as add information on new projects as they comes along. One of the most personally satisfying projects I completed in 2005 was a virtual quilt I made for a Day of the Dead show called "Ofrendas/Offerings."

Since my mother died in November, 2004, I have been traveling back and forth from Los Angeles to Pittsburgh in order to sort out and prepare my parents' house for sale. Yesterday I returned from my seventh recent trip to Pittsburgh -- each trip has lasted for at least a week, during which time I have pulled things out of closets and drawers and sorted what was meaningful from what was meant for the trash. My mother was a hoarder, and while she kept many things of interest, she used no storage system beyond the chronological (kind of like the Bibliotheque Nationale, which archives its holdings by acquisition date!) During this sorting out process, I stumbled on century-old family photographs in the midst of used wrapping paper and therefore have been forced to go through everything in the house item by item, for fear of throwing away irreplaceable treasures simply by not examining the contents of every box and used paper bag stashed in the closets and storage areas.

Getting back to the virtual quilt and my discovery of the photos that led to its creation -- Were they hidden? Stashed away and forgotten? Simply misplaced? The album included a collection of photos taken c. 1920, in and around the farm my grandmother grew up on in western Pennsylvania. Most compelling for me -- there were many pictures of my grandmother, whom I barely remember. (She died when I was three.) I had never been able to form a coherent impression of my grandmother, and these photos allowed me for more or less the first time to get to know her by means of my own powers of observation. Her reputation in the family was one of crankiness, probably due to the fact that she suffered a series of strokes during the years before she died, leaving her with an expressionless face, an impaired range of movement, and a difficult daily existence. The "Nana" I discovered in these pictures had a warm smile, a relaxed and gracious demeanor, and an obvious love for animals and children. I have also sent her photo to Edith Abeyta's blog, imissyouphotos.blogspot.com, which is an art project consisting of a collection of photos of women who are missed.

Text accompanying the installation of "Matrilineage":

This simulated quilt is composed of digitally reproduced family photos and a brightly colored baby quilt made for me by my great-grandmother. Five generations of women in my family are represented in this quilt/offering: my great-grandmother, who made the original quilt, my grandmother, my mother, my daughter, and me.

While cleaning out my mother’s house after her death last November, I discovered two suitcases full of family photo albums and photographs that I had never seen before. A number of the photos include my maternal grandmother, Ella Elizabeth Firestone Brooks, who died when I was two. Creating the “quilt” has provided me with the opportunity to sift through photos, memories and feelings, and has helped me especially to get to know and appreciate my grandmother, whom I barely remember.

Ellie, as she was called, was born at the turn of the twentieth century on a farm in Springfield, Pennsylvania, “up the mountain” on Chestnut Ridge, the last ridge of the Appalachians before they flatten into Ohio. She spent her childhood on the farm, where she worked hard helping her mother. To her deep regret, she was pulled out of school prematurely to care for her baby brother Clarence. Soon after, she married my grandfather Hess Lewis Brooks, who grew up on a neighboring farm. When Hess got a job, they moved to town. They had four children --Raymond, Madeline, Gladys (my mother), and Jack – between 1917 and 1934.

My only personal memory of Nana is of standing next to her at about knee-level, a toddler and a stroke victim learning to climb stairs together. Just a few weeks before she died in 1954 she gave me a puppy, Tiny, for Easter. She thought that I should have a puppy because I didn’t have any brothers or sisters. In many of the photos I found of Nana she is interacting with animals or surrounded by family. She was visibly fond of a horse she cared for as a teenager; cats and dogs were daily companions. Three generations later, my daughter also loves the company of animals. My grandmother became a mother at a very early age and appears to have been delighted by her children as well.

Nana showed a particular radiance and grace in many of the pictures I discovered, often in quite ordinary settings – on Sunday outings with her family, feeding the chickens, doing the laundry. Even after she left the farm, her life was shaped by work – she cooked and kept a meticulously clean house, took in boarders during the Depression, and studied to be a practical nurse during the 1940s. She and my grandfather shared an affectionate and devoted relationship until she died at 54 following a series of strokes.

I also included the following verse from "Ash Wednesday", a poem by T.S. Eliot, which especially resonated for me at the time I made the piece:

Because I know that time is always time
And place is always and only place
And what is actual is actual only for one time
And only for one place
I rejoice that things are as they are. . . .”

"Intimate Geography" and completion of shower curtain piece

After discovering two interesting artist blogs (Judy Coates Perez's www.judyperez.blogspot.com and Edith Abeyta's www.imissyouphotos.blogspot.com) I decided to take the plunge and start my own. Linda Hoag and I are curating a show to open April 8 at the Acorn Gallery in Highland Park called "Intimate Geography -- getting to know a place." She and I have been brainstorming for several years on various creative topics, and this is our most ambitious project to date. In addition to curating the show, we are contributing artwork and poetry. So far, I have completed one of two mixed media pieces for the show. It is called "Arroyo Seco Watershed and Surrounding Area," and consists of a transparent shower curtain hung from an elliptical shower curtain rod (from the gallery ceiling) covered with tiny landscape photos that include water.
I have been shooting landscape photos randomly for several years, and most of the photos I chose for this piece were taken last winter during the torrential rains that hit Southern California after Christmas. Normally there is very little visible water along the Arroyo Seco (logical!), but last year was different. I am also very interested in landscape theory, and this project plays with that a little. The original purpose of "views" or picturesque landscapes was to document locations in ways useful to their owners. Oddly enough, the water system in Altadena, where we live, is structured in such a way that water users become shareholders in various water companies. Michael and I, as stockholders of Lincoln Avenue Water Company, are therefore de facto "owners" of Arroyo Seco water. There aren't a lot of words in this piece, but I guess viewers can look at the images and come to their own conclusions about water usage, politics and the environment.