Leaf Angels in the Manner of Ana Mendieta: Ground

Here's part of another piece I've been working on for the Tourism and Tragedy series, which overlaps with The Perfect Fall series. It's called Leaf Angels in the Manner of Ana Mendieta:


I dyed a mottled ground on raw canvas, then applied a beeswax resist through rubbing pebbled pavement and brush painting. I redyed it several times, removed the wax and brought out more definition with fabric paints. I chose fabric paints so the canvas would remain soft and pliable. I wanted the paint to meld with the fibers (as in dyeing processes) rather than just sit on top of them like a traditional painting.

Finally, I drew a chalk outline where the shadow of a figure is suggested and photographed it outside on the ground. Something intrigues me about returning art to a site of inspiration like this and then (re)photographing.

I use the word 'rephotographing' because this piece was inspired by photographs I took in the Smoky Mountains for The Perfect Fall Series.

more from The Perfect Fall

This weekend was probably the last for photographing The Perfect Tree for The Perfect Fall as there were only a handful of crumpled leaves left hanging.

Below are two images of the base of the tree. The one on the left was taken midway through the project and the one on the right was taken this weekend. Both are from the same vantage point at slightly different angles and different times of day.


The Perfect Tree, 11-06-06 and 11-18-06

This piece is part of the Tourism and Tragedy series. I've been taking digital photos of one tree as its leaves change color over the course of the season, printing the images on fabric, arranging the fabric images on canvas, and stitching them together to form a composite of the "perfect tree."

November open studio, artist's statement

The working title of this series is called Tourism and Tragedy or How I learned to love where I am. This body of work is a subjective look at migration, tourism and the difficulty of presence. I’m interested in how individual experiences of particular places are mediated (and somewhat determined by) language, narrative, memory and nostalgia.

The works-in-progress shown here are a documentation of my search for and attempt to recapture a nostalgic ideal of “A Perfect Fall.” With their reference to the Eden myth, trees and Fall (the season of great beauty and loss, the mythic Fall of Mankind, falling short of an ideal, falling down) – these pieces record a striving for some idealized state, the falling short of that achievement, accepting of loss and delighting in imperfect beauty.

L.A. Trees #2: Topiary (Plato’s Tree), sets the tone for the nostalgia. This video is a sequence of still photos taken of topped and butchered trees in Los Angeles. The images are paired, story-book style, with a personal romantic narrative of my last Fall in East TN before moving to L.A. for nearly a decade. It’s a story of hope tinged with loss.

The Perfect Tree for the Perfect Fall, is a mixed-media piece that answers the L.A. Trees video and the nostalgia that grew out of living in a place without Fall color for so many years. In this piece, I paint, stitch and photograph images to build a “perfect” Fall tree. The photos are taken of one tree from multiple perspectives over the course of the season as the tree peaks into color, fades and loses its leaves. The end product will be a multi-perspectival composite of an idealized form – a flat representation where only traces and suggestions of three-dimensional space and time remain.

Leaf Angels in the manner of Ana Mendieta, similarly records the human body as an object of loss. Here, objects of beauty are photographed after their peak – their remains preserved as printed images stitched to a painted and dyed representation of the pavement on which they’ve fallen. All that survives are their representations and the traced / stitched outlines and shadow of the artist / tourist arriving too late and missing her opportunity to photograph the “perfect” scene.

cat help for The Perfect Tree for The Perfect Fall

I was working at home this morning on some printed images for constructing The Perfect Tree for The Perfect Fall (still part of the Tourism and Tragedy series), when Babette volunteered her most excellent cat help.

wall of leaves after peak and on to loss

I didn't go to the studio yesterday because I wanted to head up into the mountains (before the local peak tourism season ends) to take more photos for the Tourism and Tragedy series I've been working on.

This is the time of year when people from all over drive up into the Smoky Mountains National Park to witness and photograph the fall colors. Seems everyone is looking for a beautiful view and for ways to preserve the experience.

When I got to the mountains I (and every other driver) found that all routes into the park were closed for some mysterious reason, which I've since found to be because hurricane strength winds knocked a bunch of trees down the day before.

So I had to improvise a strategy that didn't involve me going into the park proper... not that I wasn't already improvising. I just hadn't planned on all the roads being gated closed. The improvisation was more that I wasn't fixed on what kind of photos I was going to take. I only knew that they would be more immersion type images than sweeps of vistas from afar, and that they would be composites of a site (or sites) taken over a period of weeks (or months) as the season progressed and moved into winter... depending on how long I wanted to keep it going and how large I wanted the final piece to be.

The day's photos were so so, but since this particular piece/s is ongoing, that's not too much of a problem. Here are a few of the first images:







I should acknowledge that people are "loving this park to death," so to speak. Unfortunately all the pollution from the motorized vehicles, among other sources, is killing the trees. Here's but one of the many articles.

October open studio, artist's statement

The working title of this series is called Tourism and Tragedy or How I learned to love where I am.
Image from L.A. Trees #1 and Picture Postcards with Skylines

This body of work is a subjective look at migration, tourism and the difficulty of presence. I'm interested in how an individual experience of a particular place is mediated (and somewhat determined by) language, narrative, memory and experiences of other places – both real and imagined.

Formally, the work plays with stillness and sequences / place and time. For instance, still photography is paired with written narrative in L.A. Trees #1: Palm & Sunset (Paradise / Apocalypse). Although the video medium affords a more time-based approach, movement through this particular palm-treed space has been frozen with a short sequence of photos at sunset. This stillness allows the narrative captioning to be the driving element that marks time.

In Picture Postcards with Skylines, the medium has been similarly altered. The sequence of digital images marks not only the subtle changes in two different landscapes (CA and TN) over a period of a few minutes, but constructs a fragmented panorama of imaginary place. Powerlines intersecting the skies – accentuated with machine stitching – interrupt and fragment the postcard quality of the photos and draw the two places together.

Green is the Color of my Nostalgia plays with abstraction as a parallel to incomplete memory and the psychological processes that perfect and limit recollection. Here I have created a single representation of two mountain spaces (The Smoky and Santa Monica Mountains) and their details from memory. The choice of materials (cheesecloth, plastic, etc) combined with sparse drawing and machine stitching reinforces the feeling of impossibility that occurs when trying to match physical places to my memories of them.