Mysteries of the Discarded

A few years ago in the desert, I was on a photo safari through abandoned buildings and I came upon a tattered pair of boxer shorts laying in a pool of leaves as if it had been hastily discarded by some random stranger. I took a photo of it because I was intrigued with the mystery of that abandoned piece of clothing and wondered who would stop in the middle of nowhere to take off their clothes. A young kid in the throes of prepubescent sexual experimentation in the middle of nowhere. A homeless person whose dirt had become too entrenched on a pair of shorts so that he had to leave them more than he needed the warmth to continue to wear them? Regardless, the subject fascinated me.

Since moving to Venice Beach three months ago, I have encountered this strange phenomena again. I live in a city of artists, drifters, bums and runaway teens looking for a hippie’s dream. It is the perfect environment for artistic exploration and in the process of writing my next novel, I go out into the streets daily to forage the world as one of my characters in the book. I pretend I am an old, cranky, homeless, drifter who lives under the Santa Monica pier who may or not be delusional in thinking that he is King Neptune. On my daily jaunts, I encounter an abandoned piece of clothing almost daily and have started to collect snapshots of these items in an odd pictorial scrapbook. They have become small gems in my travels, evoking wonder and musings on their back story. Sometimes hastily left in a lump on a park bench, sometimes posed like the above glove, waving at passers by who take the time to notice. Sometimes they are the fruits of a frat boy’s drunken revelry, like the pair of striped boxer shorts I found recently with a hole in the zipper center, that must have become too distracting to wear from pub to pub. Sometimes, they scare me, like a pair of denim jeans, cuffs rolled up, piled on the ground as if the person had simply been plucked right from them mid-chase.

Sometimes they are objects of beauty like this multicolored East Indian cape, left on the ground by some young “burner” wanting to rid herself of layers on a day when she happened to wake up with the luxury of sun.

To me, they have become small surprises; moments of beauty in an otherwise hurried world that cause me to stop and reflect on my good fortune and to respect the fantastic void of things unknown.

My Review of Elisabeth Higgins O’Connor at Charlie James – ArtScene 2011

Elisabeth Higgins O’Connor, “Happenstance,” 2011, cardboard, wood, resin, acrylic, paint, bed sheets, blankets, bath rugs, paper, drywall screws, 66 x 48 x 60″

Continuing through January 2011

Elisabeth Higgins O’Connor
at Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles Chinatown, California
Recommendation by Kimberly Nichols

From the mysteriously twisted and complex images of our dreams comes a suite of sculptures by Elisabeth Higgins O’Connor. The exhibition, titled “Dreadful Sorry Clementine,” presents the characters of our communal childhood psyche, alluded to from the lands of nursery rhymes, singsong fables and fairy tales, where the darkly macabre tends to mingle tenuously with the fantastical. Six to eight feet tall sculptures of crow-beasts, dog-men and multicolored flower-headed foxes stand forebodingly, while simultaneously begging compassion and evoking fragments from our own subconscious that are troubling yet comfortingly familiar. Higgins’ use of cardboard, bed sheets and other domestic materials furthers the viewers’ mixture of pleasure and unease at confronting these visions of a long stored away yesteryear. Her unique style of assemblage, bonded by stiffened fabrics and resin, furthermore conjures a sense of patchwork chaos and altered reality.

Published courtesy of ArtSceneCal ©2011

Memory Series Pieces for Catalysts: Eight Artists on the San Andreas Fault – Group Exhibition at UCR

80DK, 2011, Digital C Print on Watercolor paper, 44 X 30 inches

I was interested in finding out if memory could be altered in terms of emotional and psychological response to one’s most poignant and monumental moments in life if the environments in which the memories occurred were revisited and certain events portrayed from an aged and contemporary, adult perspective.

I began a series that depicted places of my past shown in their modern day reality, with a cast of mature characters re-enacting my memories. In most instances, the results softened the memories, making them less emotional and intense. In most occasions resolutions occurred and fondness was provoked for the human experience at large.

Til You Drop, 2011, Digital C Print on Watercolor paper, 44 X 30 inches

In one instance though I came into contact with a strange phenomenon of memory’s overall oeuvre. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, we hung out at malls, which were almost synonymous with the word “babysitter” to latchkey kids. We spent most of our self-individuating years there practicing different identities in a safe controlled environment where we could be entertained culturally (in the movie theaters), sexually (in the back halls and food court alleys), physically (cheap food and the arcades or the ice skating rinks), and mentally (the trend parade that was the revolving storefront). I spent the better part of my early high school career riding the bus after class to the mall downtown with friends where we would stash our backpacks under the public restroom sinks and with false French accents, proceed to roam the place as if we were visiting from a foreign land. Perfume samples from department stores were free, as were samples of chocolates from the gourmet candy emporium. The skater boys out back always had cigarettes and beer if we were feeling rebellious.

When I returned to revisit this particular mall to make a piece for this series, I found it the exact same way I had left it, only in ruins. There were no brand new stores to reflect the natural passing of time, or seamlessly blend my yesterday with today to produce that desired sea of good feeling. There were no empty lots or new places in its space to further express the normal ebb and flow of the cycles of life. There was no evidence to assure me that things indeed evolve and change beyond those awkward and vulnerable years. Stuck deep in the formative tome of my teenage psyche, the place was an abandoned shell, indeed producing within me a sense of being shell-shocked.

I uncovered a limbo in the annals of memory that produced neither resolution nor dissolution of the original memory and was instead now faced with the unsettling sense of simply being frozen in time.

- Kimberly Nichols November 3, 2011

Endless Summer

At the beginning of the season this year, Ryan Campbell and myself went into DOS Salon with our arts company Cooper & Campbell and created a series of paintings called COLLISION that were hard-edged, slick, metallic, and reminiscent of car veneers, slick landscapes, and contemporary interiors where shape and color influence the attitude of the surroundings.

Now, we are going into DOS again to create a new environment of abstract resin paintings on the theme Endless Summer. Think golden peach/pink sunsets, surf culture, Southern California latchkey living, childhoods spent on wheels, wood panels, light and space, waves, video games and arcades, flip flop fashion, leisure center pools and other hot weather totems of our  youth.

The show opens with a wine and snacks reception on Thursday, May 19th from 6-9 p.m. at DOS Salon, located at 73860 El Paseo Drive in Palm Desert.

We are looking forward to seeing everyone there!

3 A.M. Homecoming

In the late ’90s/early 2000s, I was a contributing editor to the English punk rock and literary magazine 3 A.M. Founded by London-bred, Sorbonne English professor Andrew Gallix, it was a hotbed of music, prose and news surrounding the best new and old voices bent towards the punk, cutting-edge, contemporary scene internationally.

I was the California editor of fiction and poetry and met talented co-editors from around the world who became lifelong friends and all successful musicians, artists and writers in their own right.

One of them was Charles Shaw, who I went on to co-edit the political magazine Newtopia with and who, today, is a major political writer and filmmaker who recently debuted his film The Exile Nation Project about the war on drugs.

Another was Utahna Faith, my soul literary sister who lived in New Orleans at the time and who arranged my New Orleans reading when I published my book Mad Anatomy in the early 2000s. She went on to become a successful fiction writer as well as editor of the literary magazine Wild Strawberries.

Another was Ohio based punk poet and experimental musician Matt Wascovich who went on to a successful music career and who collaborated on many poetry volumes with such icons as Thurston Moore, Todd Colby and Alex Gildzen. His band Scarcity of Tanks recently opened for Pere Ubu.

Another was writer Travis Jeppessen who went on to publish a novel called Victims and now is a regular contributing writer to ArtForum.

Last but not least was Canadian musician Jim Martin who continues his musically-inclined life in bands today.

Many of us have remained lifelong emeritus editors to the magazine which has morphed overtime but still remains, continually highlighting new talent in the usual realms. Recently, Utahna Faith solicited a short story from me that was published a week ago and can be read here. It was a sweet homecoming to see my Park People published in my first literary home and community and to be reminded of the good ole days when we were each just beginning our careers in the arts.

On Being An Artist – Wind as Soundtrack

Painting, at S.C.R.A.P. Gallery in Indio with Ryan. The 50 mile an hour wind is making the domed metal roof in this airplane hangar whistle and wheeze. You can hear it wailing around the place, a whiplash worthy breeze. My knees ache from crawling on the cement floor, cramp in my bones, but I am not going to stop. There’s paint to be laid, and brushes dipped in blackened water in old buckets, and pink in fling. The quietude of a mind fully engaged, eyes squinted every so often, looking at the work from various perspectives. Jumping up backwards on the table to sit and pen some words, two more hours of bliss ahead, I-Pod music, outside breaks, baby blue drops…

Wounded Man Series

I have recently started a collaborative arm of art with fellow artist and friend Dan Irvine. IN* Projects represents the work we do together when inspired by or common goals to portray social and political messages delivered to the masses via art. Our first project is the Wounded Man/Woman series, extrapolated from earlier work I had done in this realm, and made dual by our expression of both the wounded man AND woman.

Originally intrigued by the historical St. Sebastian image of the “Wounded Man”, we further researched this cultural reference. In our research we uncovered the fact that the “wounded man” was found in a variety of verbal and visual testimony over hundreds of years that, although different in cultural context, all weaved the same type… of experience of being wounded, cut, or “done surgery” upon by people describing their personal mind altered, religious, meditative, or other out-of-body experiences.

A stick-like man with arrows going into his fallen body was found on the caves of Lascaux where it is said shamans submerged themselves for periods of meditation and plant-aided hallucinations designed to go to the unseen realms and carry back pertinent spiritual information.

People who attest to being “abducted” by aliens oftentimes report being transported through their bedroom walls by rays of light that somehow allow their bodies to become molecularly diffuse and then report being taken to rooms where surgery is performed upon them. Another example of being transported n a mind-altered state to a place of physical manipulation in another realm.

This phenomenon is also reported in indigenous cultures that have used energetically elevated trance dance to again transport them to another realm where the physical is disengaged and pure consciousness prevails.

This has also been seen in religious, ecstatic experiences where people have been overtaken by rapture gaining access to visualizations and messages from “God” or “Jesus” and experiencing strange physical injuries such as bleeding from the eyes or hands.

The overall connotations being that when one is in touch with their non-ego spiritual essence, they are then cut, performed upon, healed by connection to this internal energy and forever transformed to realize the spiritual lessons that are elemental to our existence in the physical plane. Many people, after having these experiences, have stated they act differently in the world, see things with new eyes, no longer put such credence upon material things or dramatic negotiations between each other, but feel more of an overall connection to humanity at large. There is a sense that “we are all in this together” spurred by the glimpse into the spiritual realm, gaining access to evidence of a larger meaning to life than just the physical dramas that are acted out daily.

Expounding upon this with the idea that every human being is “wounded” by mere act of being communally alive in this world through the constantly shifting and perpetually relevant social and political arenas we exist within; coupled with wanting to impress upon the idea of us all being in this together, IN Projects has started the Wounded Man Series.

The series debuted on Valentine’s Day 2011 through a collaborative “plop art” project in Palm Desert, CA with two other contemporary artists named Ryan Campbell and Tim Shockley. The three of us decided to join forces, make our own individual “love letters” to the world, that we then plopped freely (without destroying surface or vandalizing) in public for anyone to find.

Dan created a male and female contemporary version of the Wounded Man graphic with the phrase “We Are All in This Together” and printed them on translucent stickers that were then adhered to random pieces of scrap wood, denoting totems much like the primal stick drawings on cave walls and wood surfaces. Raw and unpolished, these were then painted red and covered in a resin representing the fossilization of the pieces. We randomly set eight of these around a public street.

We will continue to create these random wooden totems and place them as plop art amongst our individual travels in perpetuity.

 

A Poetic Interlude

There are some relationships, and circumstances in life, that move in a circular fashion – more magical than practical and in perpetual evolution. Starting in one place, then roving through the metamorphosis of years, various incarnations and a refusal towards any complete stop lest the momentum die down. My friendship with Evelyn Posamentier is a keen example.

It began in my twenties while I was the fiction and poetry editor of a punk rock magazine called 3A.M. Magazine. I accepted her words into many issues and we spent many days on the phone – she in San Francisco as a feisty poet/librarian and me in my office/bedroom at noon in pajamas with a rebellious glass of Cabernet. Like schoolgirls we’d giggle on the phone about our refusals to ever become “normal” and “socially acceptable” women. I relished her small chapbooks that she would send in the mail to me. At least twenty years separated us but on the phone in the afternoons in the freedom of our literary minds and private spaces we were timeless; simultaneously girl, woman and crone.

I wrote this poem about our conversations that was published some time ago:

EVELEENA

There are other branches
Other fig trees
Exasperating Donnas
Beautiful vixens
And the Jewish sense of order
That comes from moments
Of intense pain
(This I connect to).
There are other sex mates and
Fancy playthings
And
Coattails trimmed with animal
Ardor.
I know
This to be true, this is true.
There are cats that walk on keyboards
Narcissistic
Wanting footprints+
Are no different from you or me.
(In the desert my voice is perfectly tuned).

A few years later we collaborated on a poem together when we were embroiled in the after effects of 9-11 and the Weapons of Mass Destruction facade; trying to hold energetic hands across cities that connected us to understand our fellow human man, inspired by official documents she was exploring in her world.

RECIPE

When the challenge of democracy
(her challenge)
is the start of a love affair. She
swoops down, the rebel
angel ecstatically diving through piles
of whipped cream and ugliness.
Molding big noses onto prom queens
lipstick grinned from ear to ear
thick hair sculpted white
white muddy
Islam is calling.
I am looking for the caliphate
And she loses herself on the way down
mixed message directions
no turning signals to signify
The ideological hay
wire
corps
the pursuance of justice through social cooperation
and mutual assistance
of whipped cream
and ugliness,
this world.
She learns to wield pliers.
Clipped wings; sewn shut
the wound gaping no more
but throbbing internally; red
pink vulnerable bruise
establishing a non-
autocratic, consultative method of
government and compassion
in social situations.
It hurts.
In the valley between her shoulders
blades gone but loss digging
in retrospect she institutionalizes mercy
and compassion sulks silently.
Mars is close to the Earth.
She will stand there
all night in the rain with one flame
and in one hour
she could burn
every last disco
down.

When I finally met Evelyn in person, it was on the occasion of her reading live at the poetry series called LIVE OUT LOUD that I coordinated for two years at the Palm Springs Art Museum. She stayed with me during her visit and like long lost friends we traversed the high desert for retro greasy spoon meals, thrift stores that sold small ceramic animals and used book stores the smelled like must as pored through the stacks for hours. Like sisters on a wild getaway we indulged our heart’s desires, purchasing whimsical things like new pink erasers for a nickel a piece that reminded me of fresh blank lined notebooks on the first day of school just waiting to be laid with naughty poetry and prose.

As they do, a few more years passed by with nary a word. Until two weeks ago when, as I walked my dog in the morning with red dress dripping with fresh paint slashes, orange flip flops and wild hair, I got a call from Evy in her deep crackling voice to let me know she wanted to use my painting of Flush Bruise for her next book which was currently being published called Royal Blue Car. Of course I was honored, but even more happy to know that life can still move in circular streams and that certain relationships walk parallel on the path, bumping into you when you least expect them to and reminding you that there is a lot of magic in the dance of the unseen muses constantly tip toeing around the intersections of passion, reality and performance.

My Avedon Review – Artillery Magazine – January 2011

Richard Avedon, Truman Capote, writer, New York, October 10, 1955

In the ANNENBERG WING of the Palm Springs Art Museum’s current exhibition “Richard Avedon: Fashion, Stage, and Screen,” the grand master of the lens is presented in two self-portraits. In the 1980 piece from his “In the American West” series, he raises his hands as if he is just about to give some instruction or perhaps, just naturally inclined to orchestrate a subject into revealing its true inner personae. The other self-portrait, taken many years later, shows the man still in a flurry of thought and process. Side by side, they reflect the renowned photographer’s constant meticulous eye, unwavering over four decades of work; as well as his signature style of utilizing a shallow depth of field and a stark visual and graphic perspective to emphasize revealed authenticity.

But the portraits also present him as the grand director of the images, which surround him in this survey, a master of capturing the personality of any subject as if each were his personal performer and his photographic frame – his specific canvas.

Known for setting new precedents for fashion and portraiture from the 1940s through the 1970s, Avedon’s work invigorated the way we considered traditional images of the iconic from vogue to celebrity.

The “Fashion” portion of this exhibit denotes Avedon’s elevation of haute couture from stiff garments on the posed model to living, breathing moments of textural rapture where fabric takes flight or confidently presents its own smooth lines.

The “Stage and Screen” portion sheds new light on the talented who have become inherently accustomed to being on stage by emphasizing movement, or the lines of the body within context of the action. Or as in the case of En Pointe, where Rudolph Nureyev’s foot finds center stage within the frame, we find the stark truth of ballet’s craft in the calloused heel and magnified flesh where hair stands up, electrified by the agony and the ecstasy of the dance.

In the section “Writers and Westerners,” we see Truman Capote in 1955 with his nude chest exposed and head cocked to the side, daring and flamboyant in the thralls of his success as a writer, only to find another portrait taken 20 years later capturing the more seasoned author’s provocative and sinister gaze -still taunting, although weathered.

In “Famous Performers,” we see Avedon’s directness in representing our cultural legends beyond projected impressions and into that private place where their artistic magic takes flight. Jimmy Durante is caught dead-on in his mischievousness. Marian Anderson’s mouth, a solid “O” of powerful velocity as she sings, positioned off-center of the screen as if caught in a self-created wind turbine. And Louis Armstrong, a frenetic blur of motion save for two soulful eyeballs as he blows poignancy from his instrument.

Although an overall view of his work bears similar characteristics, it’s the nuances of individuality that occur on second glance per individual piece that mark the artistry of Avedon’s calculated eye. Techniques like blur, focus and motion take the place of color, brushstroke and medium to present the physical and psychological timbres.

Capturing the unexpected, Avedon set new standards for photographers to follow and an impetus to go beyond, influencing talents like Bruce Weber, Helmut Newton, and even his friend Diane Arbus. The photographer injected our collective vision with a hunger to probe deeper into what lies beneath, as equally applicable to the future of fine art photography as to the pages of Rolling Stone or Vogue.

Avedon once said, “I have always been aware of a relationship between madness and beauty.” This exhibition is a refreshing reminder of this notion in an age of the cinematic airbrush and the polished, perfected facade.

Ends January 30, 2011

-from Artillery

Magma .2

We are all born to mothers….but how fortunate the few of us who find our one true others…the life givers…educators…womb nurturers…