The one that got away.

I’m the kind of traveler who has more reading material than shoes in her departing luggage. Returning, I usually have bits of concrete and rock carefully wrapped in scarves and wedged between my never-worn athletic clothes. Whether visiting a new city for public art inspiration or escaping to nature, my trips are spent carefully observing the ground. Terra firma is where I find the most accessible connection to the lands I traverse and the people who inhabit them.

The global pandemic has reminded me that experiences are more meaningful than objects and that taking even the littlest fragment of another peoples’ infrastructure or culture exercises my White Supremacy. And thus, on my first return to the States in 16 months, I had zero souvenirs of the global ubiquitousness of asphalt or concrete.

But boy is possession-in-the-name-of-art a hard habit to break, and I sit here in my cold studio pining for “the one that got away.” Yes, I left a piece of concrete in its natural habitat. Here she is:

I found her on a Caribbean beach. She was a few feet from the water and a few yards from a contemporary condo being meticulously taken apart by locals. Neat piles of floor tiles, timbers piled like Pick Up Sticks, and wires hanging without fixtures suggested people were salvaging every last reusable piece of a once opulent modern-day hacienda. (Don’t get me started on the ratio of dark-skinned staff to light-skinned guests.) I imagine the sea reached “previously unthinkable heights” and came too close for the owner’s comfort. (That or construction has been delayed by years and there’s no concern for the sea’s inland march.)

But this piece, the one that got away, suggests destruction. She was most likely part of a larger sidewalk or exterior surface formed to make the coastal area’s sharp, coral bed less irritating to bare toes. Her grid is too uniform in depth to be an impression left by something on top of her, say tile. And if the surrounding luxury condos indicate this habitat’s function, a “faux tile” would not be appropriate for an interior where shaved coral tiles are the norm. Concrete, after all, is too utilitarian a material.

And this is what I love about using concrete for and in artmaking — making the mundane special.

This little gem of a castoff has given me ideas about reclaiming elements from an emergent piece that has been with me since December 2019, informing next steps in the evolution of the Sidewalk Series. Let’s call this work “Tray” for what it was molded from, a catering tray. Tray was my second and last experiment spray painting asphalt. It convincingly demonstrated that silver leaf on asphalt looks like bad tin foil art, and copper on concrete is too trendy. (Might as well make paperweights for a boutique.)

Tray, as a 14”x14” mini materials test site, has also been taunting me to more fully explore concrete and asphalt’s materiality. It is slowly degrading from gravity — it’s on a 45-ish degree angle — and the fluctuating temperature and humidity of a less-than-perfect-climate-controlled art studio. It is falling apart before my eyes. Sort of like everything else on earth.

I keep thinking I’ll smash it up soon and make it into something else. But it seems as long as the pandemic lasts, Tray will serve a purpose as my own terra firma, teaching me, little by little, what I came to the studio to discover.

“Tray,” the site of so many failure. Now a mini job-site and attempt to sort and recycle all of the original materials.

Vogue of the future, an object for digital consumption?

With tiny scissors, glue, and tweezers, I’ve covered almost 200 faces of the May 2020 issue of Vogue using only the paper available from April’s issue. I’ve made a face covering for every face presented in the magazine but I don’t know why I did it — to keep from going mad during quarantine? — or what to do with the completed object.

All I want to do now is get the magazine into the hands of friends and watch and listen for their reactions. But the pages are becoming fragile with all of the handling and I’m terrified to let it go in the mail. I fear losing this baby, both an albatross that kept me hunched over my desk for six weeks but also a calling that gave me purpose during these uncertain times.

Testing stop motion animation with the modified May 2020 issue of Vogue.

I’m choosing to see this as yet another opportunity to expand my practice — to blend object and digital spaces — and I’m calling upon older video works to inform the next steps. My “perfect room” rendered by Corey Beaulieu for Where Ever You Go There You Are, 2012 was missing a bathroom, kitchen, and closet but damn that room was seductive to me at the time. It played in the same space this work does, using luxury shelter magazines as its starting point to question desire and necessity.

As I blunder around learning Adobe Premiere, I’m beginning to invent a character who might be flipping through this issue. Is it Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue? Or a young transgender woman? Does she identify with Vogue’s aesthetic elitism? Or aspire to the One Percenter lifestyle the magazine centers on? And is she looking at the magazine now in the midst of the pandemic or in some future moment? Or is this all perhaps a media play, destined to be a press release and pdf version of the magazine slipped into the archives of Vogue as I did at Elsewhere Museum with The Future Is Today?

All that is clear to me is that the longer this pandemic, the more our prior notions of luxury will likely look like the hemlines of the past.

Taken for granted

Families and our relationships within them are complicated. So too is our place within nature. Too often we take both for granted. 

I spent a good part of this Mother’s Day, my first and hopefully only in a pandemic, taking apart and upgrading an old iMac with the hopes of returning to the film I had digitized from three generations of Wolfs and Gilberts. 

Looking back on this last video I made, I finally understood why I chose today of all days to recommit to this work. Mom and I are seen at the end, at about the same age, 20+ years apart.

Single channel video using found family footage (16mm and 8mm) from 1937-1978; focusing on land use management, nature and play. 2:49 min.

Modeling good behavior

It struck me as odd and out of step that this May’s issue of Vogue didn’t show a single masked person. So, I’m working on making masks for every one of the models in the May issue.

Here are a few from April’s edition and a sketch for something, I don’t yet know what, to address how this pandemic is affecting girls and young women.

Masks for Vogue, April 2020. Magazine papers on product models from the April 2020 issue of Vogue US.

“Four Hands,” 2020. Sketch for performance and/or performance objects.
Magazine, watercolor paper and pencil. 8.5”x11”