from the many, one.

Axle Contemporary is a sort of rolling gallery in a truck. The two directors, using that term loosely, because they'd probably laugh, are Matthew Chase-Daniel and Jerry Wellman. Their program, again using the term loosely, involves a few group shows in the summer, with one of them, usually Jerry, manning the gallery and chatting up the visitors, and installations in the winter that are visible through glass, thus the truck can sit unattended.

There are a few sites where the parked truck is welcome, like the Farmer's Market, and SITE Santa Fe, but if they want to park it downtown, for instance, they have some serious issues. I'm not sure if they feed the meter all day or what. But that's where the bulk of the walking traffic is, especially in the summer.

Their latest project is called E Pluribus Unum which involved taking a photograph of anyone who walked in, and each person would hold something that was dear to them. At the end, after the portraits were displayed all over the truck, the photographs were combined into one portrait, a meta-being if you will. It's pretty clearly female, and I can't reproduce it so you'll have to check it out here.

I thought it was a brilliant idea and I bought the book that they published of all the photos. Some of them are people I knew, my students, colleagues, and friends; but most of them I don't. As I flip through the book I reflect on how the people in it are specific to Santa Fe in a way- I mean they certainly don't look like folks back east. I regret not taking part, and I can't explain why I didn't except I don't love having my photo taken and displayed on a truck. The project speaks to the specificity of place and time and having the book gives me a little piece of that.

atomized

My continuing journey into the tangles of Santa Fe community:
Saturday I went to a brunch sponsored by the New Mexico Museum of Art to celebrate the opening of the latest Alcove 12.0 exhibit. This is a new series curated by Merry Scully, of small shows of work by contemporary New Mexican artists. It's a breath of fresh air for the museum. My good friends
Jane Lackey and Linda Swanson were in the first group, so I was on the guest list. This was for the second group, which included Harmony Hammond and Terri Roland.

It was crowded at the brunch and I saw lots of people from afar but I ended up having a really interesting conversation with a writer, Kay Hagan. We talked about developing friendships in Santa Fe. She's from back east as well and she described the community here as "atomized." It seemed like a perfect word to describe the way people know each other but are sort of floating in the air in their own worlds. Not like New York, where everyone is on top of each other and you're forced to be involved. There's something nice, and comforting, about never being alone; but the freedom of roominess appeals as well. It's probably one of the things people move here for. And yet there are only something like 73,000 residents of Santa Fe. This makes it a small town, with small town occurrences.

Being atomized means you have to make a little more effort to catch the personalities. It also means true friendships take a while to develop. One woman told me not long ago, that if someone asks me how long I've been here, to say "two years." Not less than that. So many people come and go- this is probably why people don't automatically add you to their social circle. It actually has been about two years that I've lived here and I can honestly say it's starting to feel different.

Kay pointed out that this area is one of the only ones in America where you can be in the midst of settlements that are 900 years old, like the Taos pueblo. I had never thought of it quite like that. It's so steeped in history, in diverse cultures. And as much as we artists like to scoff at much of the work we see that's meant for the tourists, northern New Mexico has a very long history as an art colony, and serious work was made here.

Here's a painting by Marsden Hartley.

press

My book piece is featured in this article by the Iraqi novelist Lutfiya Al-Duleimi. I wish I could read Arabic, but even not knowing what it says, the calligraphy is so beautiful, I love the way it looks. Arabic readers, you're invited to translate!

why taking the time to test is a good idea

An artist's cautionary tale:
As I mentioned in an earlier post, I was invited to participate in an exhibition for which I would be paired with a local poet. The piece was to include the text of one of the poet's works. I was paired with Charles Trumbull, who is a well-respected and published haiku poet. He sent several to choose from, explaining that what he chose seemed to be related to Santa Fe and the landscape. Here are a few:

on the bronze pate

of Saint Francis of Assisi

houseflies

snow-filled juniper:

a flock of mountain bluebirds …

such a commotion!

flashes of dark and light

through the piñon trunks:

a magpie

piñon smoke

the first snow lingers

on the wooden bridge

high plains dusk:

the blades of the windmill

churn through loneliness

The one I chose was this:

the aspens 

and the chamisa agree

on a shade of yellow

For a long time I pondered what to do with it, but I really loved the subject. Autumn here in New Mexico is the most beautiful time, and I've posted before about the exquisite aspens, so it felt like a good fit. At first I thought about using mylar, and cutting the letters out and having gold leaf show through. Then I saw something in a store in Williamsburg that was a ceramic tray, glazed with gold, and I thought about painting the letters on it and hanging it on the wall, or having it sit on a pedestal with a light above it. In hindsight, maybe I should have gone with one of those ideas. But then I got the idea of using old postcards of New Mexico in a large collage, and cutting the letters out from that. There is a woman here who sells all sorts of ephemera, old books, maps, tons of stuff. So I went to see her and sure enough she had some old postcards. Not that many, but I bought some more on ebay.

I certainly didn't want to ruin the precious postcards, which couldn't be replaced if I screwed up, and also wanted to repeat some. So I scanned them all in, and over a period of time taping them in different combinations onto heavy watercolor paper, I got a design that I liked. I used jade glue to glue them onto the paper, which worked fine. After creating the text in Photoshop and blowing it up large, I transferred it to the collage and very carefully cut the letters out of the top layer of the collage, so just the colored part was peeled off. It looked pretty good. But I wasn't quite happy with it and decided to use amber shellac in some places. More experimenting, more taping, more gluing. Now the whole thing was done, but I wanted it to be stiff enough to hang a bit away from the wall. And here is where things went awry.

Note to self: foam-core, no matter how thick, does not like water based glue. I found this out when I pasted the foam-core onto the back of my piece, cut so that the piece was still irregularly shaped, put heavy books on top, and waited till the morning to take the books off and view my masterpiece. And that's how I ended up with a buckled mess that resembled a wrinkled satellite dish.

Now, dear reader, you can only imagine what my state of mind was after all the work I had done. And quite frankly, I was not about to do it all over. I happened to have friends for dinner that night and showed it to them. Lots of ideas bandied about. Ultimately, I redid the arrangement in Photoshop and took it to a digital printer, who printed it and mounted it on Sintra. And though I feel somewhat removed from it, because it's not handmade, it's clean, it's crisp, it does the job. The printer put some furring strips on the back that he said I could attach wire to for hanging, so I did.

I hung it up in the studio. That night, a loud noise, which got the dog barking and me out of bed, but all seemed well. Next morning I discovered the piece on the floor with a bent corner and the furring strip torn off. Back to the printer, who attached more Sintra and the wire differently, and who said it would hold. And I hope it does. 

It will be on display at the Community Gallery, downtown Santa Fe, from March 23 to June 8.

a book with no words

I have mentioned before the book project I'm involved in and now my book is finished, so I'll describe it in more detail. Last February I signed on to be part of a project called An Inventory of al-Mutanabbi Street. This is the street of bookstores in Baghdad, a meeting place for writers and thinkers, a center for those who value the written word. A 2007 car bomb destroyed the street and killed at least 30 people. The project was organized by Beau Beausoleil, who owns  The Great Overland Book Company in San Francisco, and Sarah Bodman, a book artist in the UK (you can google Beau's store, but he doesn't have a website as far as I know.)  For this part of the project, over 200 book artists will each make an edition of three books- one will be sent to the National Library in Baghdad, and two will travel in group exhibitions. There is a comprehensive website here with images of the wonderful books that have been submitted so far. 


We were given one year from when we signed on to complete our books. It took me a while to figure out what I was going to do. I didn't want to offend anyone, since it's a delicate subject and I felt uncomfortable that I'm not more well-versed in Islamic beliefs. Ultimately I decided to make books that referred aesthetically to Islam and that honored those who died that day. I thought of the book as a memorial object but one that would provide a glimmer of hope for renewal. So the book is black, with silkscreened pattern on the covers, and handmade abaca paper inside. Each page is cut in repeating horizontal rectangles as if there was text removed. I had a list of the names of 26 of those who died and I was able to find someone to write them in Arabic; then I carefully painted them onto ribbons with a tiny brush. This took me three days, but I enjoyed the process. And so here is the final result. This shows two books, so I could show the bookcloth as well as the interior. I titled the book Rabii, which means "spring" in Arabic. The transliteration is somewhat different than the Arabic word because of the ending sound, which can't be spelled in English. 


Green is considered the traditional color of Islam. From Wikipedia: Green wrist bands, threads and bracelets containing Islamic calligraphy are worn by Muslims in order to identify themselves as Muslim. The green wrist bands and bracelets contain Islamic calligraphy or some are worn as plain green threads.


Interestingly, I didn't know about the wristbands, but am happy about the reference. I was thinking green and Islam, and the Arab spring. Today, news from Syria and Egypt continues to cast a pall over the exuberance of last spring, but one hopes for peace and harmony in the region.

poems

I'm taking part in an exhibition that pairs artists with poets. More about that after I finish the work. For today I'm posting a lovely Wallace Stevens poem that a friend posted on Facebook. If I understand correctly, it has not been published.

"In a Cloudy Land"


In a cloudy land
There is a moving river
A deep and moving river
Sliding through gray sand


There is no sound there
Except of moving water
Of deep and sliding water
And of restless air


Two flamingoes pass
One then the other flying
Wearily, over-flying
That watery glass

The flamingoes make me think of my roots in Florida- such funny birds, so beautiful in masses. But of course it's not about that. I think the poem is about living, about being in the unknown, but living each day, staying in motion; and every once in a while, something happens, something colorful and fleeting, interrupting the silence and the gray.

Mysticism of Islam

For years I've been interested in Islamic art forms. I've always thought the Muslim and Hebrew values and traditions to be closely related, and I've spent many hours looking at illuminated texts from both religions. The more I see Islamic art, the more I become aware of its richness, density, and systematic underpinnings that adhere to mystical narrative. For instance, consider this passage from Keith Critchlow's Islamic Patterns: An Analytical and Cosmological Approach:

Once the enclosing circle is completed, a unity is obtained; this reflects the unity of the original point. The circle is not only the perfect expression of justice—equality in all directions in a finite domain—but also the most beautiful “parent” of all the polygons, both containing and underlying them. Outside the concept of time, the circle has always been regarded as a symbol of eternity, without beginning and without end, just being. As a symbol within the limits of time, or rather subject to that condition of existence, it passes around just as the active compass point returns to its first position it necessarily passes over it and in principle establishes a helix—the expression in time of the circle. The circle expresses “threeness” in itself, i.e. center, domain, periphery; and “fourness” in a manifest context, i.e. center, domain included, boundary, domain excluded.

I've been working with circles within squares in various forms, most obviously in my series Aureola: 

I was thinking about crop circles, too. Flying back and forth from east to west, you can't help but be struck by the patterning of circles and squares that stretch across the landscape below. 

When I was in New York recently, I visited the Metropolitan Museum's fabulous new Islamic wing, now called Art of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia and Later South Asia. Imagine that on a wall text! Artisans from Fez were brought in to do the carving in a recreation of a Moroccan portico:

The galleries are really exquisite and full of wondrous things. I took a few photos (not enough, I realize now.) I saw a lot of Islamic manuscripts while in New York. There was an exhibition of them at the Morgan Library as well.

This page is at the Met. It illustrates an episode in the mystical Sufi poem, "The Conference of the Birds." Here is the wikipedia synopsis: 

The Conference of the Birds (Persian: منطق الطیر, Mantiqu 't-Tayr, 1177) is a book of poems in Persian by Farid ud-Din Attar of approximately 4500 lines. The poem's plot is as follows: the birds of the world gather to decide who is to be their king, as they have none. The hoopoe, the wisest of them all, suggests that they should find the legendary Simorgh, a mythical persian bird roughly equivalent to the western phoenix. It is an allegory of the quest for God (The Simorgh). The hoopoe respresents a sufi master and each of the other birds represents a human fault which prevents man from attaining enlightenment. When the group of thirty birds finally reach the dwelling place of the Simorgh, all they find is a lake in which they see their own reflection.

I took that photo with my phone so it's not the best, but if you check that wikipedia entry there is a better one, though it's not the full page with the beautiful border. You can see the hoopoe on the rock towards the right side. He's not the biggest bird, but he apparently knew how to work a crowd. I never saw a hoopoe and wondered what they look like, so here is a photo of one:

Quite a snappy little fella! I love this story for many reasons, and have a wonderful book of it published in the UK last year. The Sufis believe that the deity is within each of us, and I think that's a great concept. Back in the day I used to go to Kripalu, the yoga retreat. After each yoga class the instructor would make a praying bow to each of us and say, Jai Baghwan. I bow to the light within you.

It's a new year. Let's acknowledge the light within ourselves.