"Clarity" at Napa Art on First

Some photos from the opening for Napa's "Art on First" event this week. For the event, artists take over the empty storefronts in downtown Napa, and the installations will be up for the next year, barring any spaces getting rented.

These are shots of my installation, Clarity. The panels are made from Schoenoplectus californicus, better known as tule or California bulrush, harvested from the shores of Winery Lake.

(Click on images for enlargements).

To me, this is an example of how handmade paper art can transcend being just a an art object made in a craft tradition, to becoming site-specific and a form of Land Art. Clarity is made out of the land itself, and is being shown only a few miles from where the plants that it originated from grew.

As I said in my statement, I called the piece Clarity in reference to the "transparency and purity of the Napa River, but also [to suggest] the insight gained when we understand its value." Today, as I look at these photos, I can't help thinking about my conversation earlier this week with Jill about water usage in handmade paper, and how water will play out politics and survival in the future.

I love the Napa Art community, such wonderful, inspiring and amazing folks. Some very sweet friends from Napa told me that this piece was "poetry on paper, in this little context it is a huge continent."

Special thanks goes to the Arts Council of Napa Valley, particularly Christy Bors for all her organizing, and Cohan Sculley, for coordinating installation, general helpfulness, and above all, patience with me as installing dragged on and I kept saying I was almost done....thank you.

A visit to Stanford and the Cantor

A few weeks ago, I had a chance to visit Stanford University and see the Cantor Museum. This precedes my trip up north, and I thought I'd take a break from my irregularly scheduled programming to post about it. Stanford, if you have to ask, is a gorgeous campus. The picture above is their church, which is designed in a mixture of Romanesque and Byzantine styles, and executed in way that feels authentic rather than imitative.

The Cantor has a small but impressive collection. For instance, it was my first time ever seeing a Duane Hanson sculpture in real life.

It was positively creepy - I keep seeing the figure out of the corner of my eye and thinking there was a real person there, even after I'd read the label and with knowing who the heck Hanson was to begin with!

Get a load of the details:

Another artist I had heard of, but never experienced their work outside of photographs was Richard Serra.

I'd never been too impressed with him from photographs (C'mon, big steel things! I'm over Big/Overwhelming=Good Artist). But I'll grant that actually walking through a Serra changed my mind. Due to the tilted nature of the walls, you have to be cognizant of space, otherwise you'll hit your head.

Which I'm sure was his intention - to make the viewer uncomfortable.

However, I also found myself intrigued with the labyrinthine nature while inside it.

In front of the Cantor was their newest - installation? Acquisition? Not sure. A work by Andy Goldsworthy.

I usually love Goldsworthy, but this piece felt lacking. On one level, its winding nature speaks to the Serra a few hundred feet (and behind a high wall) away.

I wasn't sure how I felt about it being sunken. I walked down into the piece and around it, and it didn't seem to add to the piece at all.

In fact, I like the piece better in these pictures than I did when I was actually there - I'm not sure what that means. It felt to me that this piece, in this arid, sandy environment needed to engage the landscape more - like there should have been water rushing through it, and the reason for the wall's curves was to guide the water. On the Cantor's website, it states, "Set in a trough in the earth, the sculpture gives the appearance of an archaeological excavation. Over time, the land around the work will return to its natural state and animals will settle into the site. The stone has traveled full circle: quarried initially for Stanford University buildings, it now returns to the earth in another form."

I like that idea, so...maybe I'll like the piece more later.

I know I've chosen to write here about three white guys, and the museum, like many, is pretty white-guy heavy. In deference to this, I'll say I really enjoyed the exhibition of contemporary Chinese Art - particularly the Xu Bing - but out of respect for works on paper I didn't take any pictures. The collection of Native American art - both historic and contemporary, is pretty impressive and I was glad I got to see that as well. There were also statements posted by Stanford students reflecting on the work for visitors to read, which contained some pretty insightful and eye-opening revelations. It seemed to also emphasize that university museums like the Cantor really do belong to the students, as much as their libraries and classrooms should.

The Cantor has free admission, you don't have to be part of the Stanford community to go see it, and I recommend it!

Thoughts on travel

Spent some time this morning reflecting on when I was an Artist-in-Residence in Costa Rica. The image above is a plate I made there, that I brought back to the US with me to print. The colony I was at did not have a press, so I had a hand-printing setup for some of my work, however, some of the collographs I made I realized needed the intense pressure that only a press can apply.

The print is called Los Amantes, Spanish for The Lovers. It's based on a pair of trees on the border of the property where I was staying, that had grown together over a fence of barbed wire. I have a feeling in reality the wire was woven through the narrow opening between the trees, but the imagery made me think of faery tales in which two lovers, who cannot be together for some reason, are transformed at the end of the tale into trees, or stars, or some other form that allows them to be united. 

I realize now what I was doing was mythologizing the landscape. Which is something I rather enjoy doing, and find that it influences my studio practice quite a bit. Stories of place inform site-specific artwork, which is something I am very interested in. As I pursued this string of thought, it provides understanding of the importance of location for indigenous people - it is not only where their ancestors have lived, the landscape encompasses their metaphysic.

If you think about it, it's why religions such as Christianity, which are not site-specific, have been able to spread. Yes, they have a connection to physical places like Jerusalem, but I have a feeling a majority of people who call themselves Christians will never visit. And some of the settings, such as the Garden of Eden, have disputed physical locations, and are really considered more intangible places. But if your stories are connected to place, and you believe as the Ohlone that Mount Diablo was the point of creation, it's more than just a mountain to you.

As a newcomer to California, I wish I knew more of these stories of place. I'm slowly working on it with the help of my local library, however, it's much easier to find information about post-conquest California, and all of the accounts I have found are interpretations by early Californios and colonists. These stories are important to me because they open my eyes to the historic long arc of the land, beyond the colonial visions of Wild West, Gold Rush, Bear Republic, and so on. By living here, I share location with that history, and I can feel its presence, but must self-educate to understand. Knowledge of such history influences me as an artist, and hopefully I can give such history the respect it deserves.