keys, collection project

these drawings are about life size, key size. the keys are all for locks that don't exist anymore. or they just don't work, like the one that broke in half-- that one is for my car door which does still exist. the two car keys together are both for cars that are now totalled. one is for my old volvo, the one i had since i was 16 and got totalled a few years ago, the other one is from eleanor's saab which was known as herbie, someone ran into it while it was parked on the street. a lot of the keys are from dana's giant keyring. he had a lot of keys that had outlived their buildings, one for a cabin that was destroyed and a gate that was torn from its posts. weight of time and memory. sometimes we carry things around that we don't really need. we can't let them go because of what they mean, what they might still open.

small storm

this piece reminds me of the warm lonely feeling that you get when you are all alone in the house looking out at a rainstorm. it also reminds me of kansas where i admit i have never been

new work: wedding wishes

the background wrapping paper in this drawer comes from my great grandmother via my great uncle. it has cherubs and bells on it and reads "wedding wishes". this piece has a more obvious narrative or message than my others because of the tension between this message and the precarious stack of houses teetering in the middle of the field.

influences

before i show you what i have been working on lately, i need to give credit where credit is due. there are three artists that i feel linked to through this work:

i have been obsessed on an off by gordon matta-clark ever since seeing slides of his work in a contemporary art class. he got famous cutting up abandoned houses. sometimes he literally cut them in half, or he cut the corners off or cut sections out to bring into the gallery. it gives me the shudders. cutting an old house seems as delicate and transgressive as cutting a cadaver. he plays with size-- houses are supposed to encompass and shelter a person, but pieces of a wall in a gallery are so personal, you can see every scratch every wrinkle every mark of time and use.

joseph cornell became my hero when i read a book called Dime Store Alchemy by charles simic. joseph cornell has been described as a "fellow traveller" of the surrealist movement. he juxtaposed bizarre objects, usually salvaged from the trash, to create eerie narative scenes usually in decrepit looking boxes. i love this guy.

recently i was in the lacma and i saw a painting that stopped me in my tracks. it was a large canvas with a small delicate pencil sketch of a house directly in the center. surrounding it was a field of industrial gray. it reminded me so much of my first drawer painting of the village. it was by an artist named joe goode. he did a few houses like this and the sense of isolation, desolation and exclusionary domesticity that i see in them resonates with me deeply. now that i have seen his paintings i am consciously working to do something different than what he did, but his houses are beautiful and i agree with them.

first drawer: a lonely town

When i made this piece last year, i knew i was going somewhere good but i didn't know exactly where i was going. i think this piece tells a story, but not a specific one. for me it tells about a small forgotten town, not unlike the one i am trying to forget. in los angeles we have a lot of people shutting away small town memories in the top drawers of our imaginations. once again, like the previous pieces, and the subsequent ones, it is about traveling back and forth in time and memory. use and obsolescence and filling in your own blanks

so far

i love how these pieces look together. they are colored pencil on gessoed wood (found) and are 48.5 x 13 inches each. the old tools show all the use, all the work they have done over the years. the people who used them left an imprint, a signature, a ghost of action on them, as did air and water and sunlight. the mannequin hands do reference the relationship between hands and tools when they are hung together... but they show decay and disuse, not proud functionality. they show old age and have lost some of their resemblance to the idealized human appendages they once represented. when a real woman's hands age, you begin to see what they are made of, the bones the tendons and veins. and as these romantic depictions of a woman's hands travelled through life they revealed their insides too-- it is kind of like particle board.

so far

these are ink drawings on found and salvaged boards. the drawings are all discarded objects from the sidewalk, some drawn in situ and some without context. the large one in the middle is my favorite, the one with the drawers stacked on the chair. we brought home the drawers in a dresser as they are often found. josh took the drawers out for some reason and stacked them on that chair (another salvage piece from a different time). the smell rising from them was a warm woody earthy mildewy smell mixed with a light perfume. the smell transported me to my grandmother's house in london, visiting for the first time when i was eight. my grandmother has completely lost her memory now so any memory of her hits me particularly hard. the precariousness of the stack also reminds me of time and life and loss. so that picture is called Ruth.