I left off, I think, Friday night, after our visit to the Los Angeles County Museum. Saturday, we went out for a morning cup of coffee in neighboring Atwater, where we sat outside on the sidewalk with George, despite a heavy mist that bordered on a light drizzle. Our annual June gloom has been much wetter and colder than is usual; most often, at this time of year, we get a marine layer of cloud in the morning and expect it to burn off by the middle of the day. Not so this year. The clouds have brought with them an unusual amounts of moisture, and have refused to burn off, lasting through the afternoon and on into the evening. This English weather is the cause of severe depression in large numbers of Southern California natives.
From coffee, on to the Farmers Market on Sunset Boulevard in the Silver Lake/Echo Park neighborhood, where George and I had to wait patiently in the drizzle whilst Ellie did some shopping. It seems that the local fire trucks gather here in large numbers on a Saturday morning, parking in a line down the middle of the street while the fire guys disappear into the market for their morning coffee. It may be something of a public relations gesture, too. They obviously go out of their way to be friendly, inviting small children to take a look inside their cabs and chatting up the locals.
Just noting what happens in our part of town at weekends, when we're normally gone...
We lazed around with newspapers and books for much of the afternoon, then joined up with our daughter and her friend for dinner at the remarkable Fatty's Cafe in Eagle Rock. A first-rate vegetarian restaurant, Fatty's is the avocation of the artist Kim Dingle, whose wickedly funny and disturbing paintings of scrappy little girls...
... have earned her a distinguished international reputation. Kim gave us a warm reception and had a great corner table waiting for us, and recommended "the best Sauvignon Blanc" she'd ever tasted. It was, indeed, a first-class wine (with an interesting new glass stopper), and the vegetarian plates were excellently prepared and tasty. Take my word, it's a great dinner stop for anyone in the Los Angeles area--well worth a commute from any part of town.
During the jury selection process for the recent personal injury trialon which I served as a juror, I ran into the artist Daniel Brodo, who invited me to his opening at MorYork Gallery--not far from Fatty's in the Highland Park district, a hub of vigorous and adventurous galleries that show artists still young--or foolish!--enough to be ready to take risks. (Check out the Northeast Los Angeles Arts Organization.)
My friend Daniel--whose work I had not known previously--shows an apparently simple but in fact highly complex installation, constructed entirely out of sheets of cardboard, joined together to form a string of uniquely-shaped, irregular polyhedrons that snakes through the gallery space like some giant, ungainly serpent...
The piece is called "My Luck" because the shape of each element in the chain is based on the differential between lotto numbers picked by Daniel over period of months and the actual, winning numbers. Don't ask for further explanations--it's too much for my small, distinctly un-mathematical brain--but the whole effect is a cheerful reminder of the role of chance in our lives, and of its odd, unpredictable realization in the physical world. You don't have to understand too much (I hope!) about the process to get the feel of the thing when you share what space its impressive presence allows you as you twist and duck around it.
MorYork is remarkable not only for Daniel's exhibit. It's a huge, hanger-like space that looms far back beyond the exhibition space the occupies about the front quarter of the building. Venture further back and you'll find yourself in an insanely cluttered fantasy-land of assemblage art, the domain of the gallery co-owners Bob Breen and Clare Graham. Clare, as I understand it, is the one responsible for the creation of the literally hundreds of objects, large and small, that are crammed together, higgledy-piggledy, with narrow paths between for the bemused, bewildered visitor--objects created out of an infinite variety of obsessively collected items: bottle caps, jigsaw puzzle pieces, chains and cages, Scrabble boards, bones and doll limbs, religious icons...
(Sorry, my cell phone pictures can't begin to do justice to this spectacle!) Clare clearly belongs in the great tradition of obsessive assemblage artists as diverse as Tony Duquette, who created those way over-the-top California angels; Simon Rodia of Watts Towers fame; the artist Noah Purefoy, creator of a mind-boggling acreage of environmental work in Joshua Tree, California; and lesser-known, self-taught artists like Grandma Prisbey, whose Bottle Village is sadly deteriorating--all of whom have now gone on to their justly rich rewards in assemblage heaven, where a paradise of junk must have awaited them. These jackdaw collectors have an eye for beauty where the rest of us see only kitsch or junk. As for Clare, I'm hoping to follow up with him in the near future.
A final stop for the evening at Kristi Engel Gallery, kitty corner from MorYork, where we enjoyed more sculptural installation work by Rebecca Ripple--the small white letters embedded at the apex of each of these...
... spell out "Me Please"--or, of course, "Please Me"... a paradox the comments wryly on the the image of those gauzy, Catholic-school uniform skirts and the wormy growths that emerge from beneath them, all gathered in a gossipy gaggle that asks us to place ourselves in the uncomfortable ground between feminist freedom and traditional attitudes about gender. Ripple's "God"...
...is a funny, furry, vinyl-leathery, shoe-type thing that works much bigger, in the mind, than its small scale. Who is God? What is She? Why do we put Him/Her on a pedestal? Ad infinitum.
So that was Saturday. I'm not too keen on long blog entries, so I'll stop here, and think more about art--and poetry--when I get to write about our Sunday.
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