Mapping My Los Angeles by Reconstructing the Thomas Guide

Three years ago, I moved from LA after almost a decade there. Life in LA entailed long, traffic-heavy, and intense drives, but also many opportunities to walk for pleasure or errands. I was fortunate to live in Silverlake, a neighborhood where I could walk to most of the shops: Trader Joe's and Mayfair, a health food store, a post pack and ship, hardware and art supply, Video Journeys, movie theaters, boutiques, restaurants, bars and even a yoga studio. Most weekends I could usually park my car and not drive at all, unless to visit far-flung friends. Most friends were far-flung because we were all driving long distances to get to our school or work or other places where we might have originally met. On average, most people I know in LA drive 40 or 50 miles a day, which was true for me as well. However, it's not uncommon for people to drive much longer distances throughout greater LA County.

In the days before GPS technology was as mainstream as now, everyone I knew found her or his way around the city with the
Thomas Guide, a several hundred page, spiral-bound, street-by-street map of LA. The Thomas Guide opens with a page-size image of LA County with grids and numbers corresponding to the hundreds of close-up maps that follow. I so often used my first 1997 Thomas Guide that the worn and highlighted pages started falling out. I eventually replaced it with a 2002 edition that stayed pretty much intact because, in those 5 years, I'd committed to memory so much of the city that I rarely needed to check for specific streets. When I left LA, I had one very worn and one relatively new book map of Los Angeles.

While living in LA, I began to have the notion of deconstructing and then reconstructing that map of the sprawl. Shortly after leaving, I took apart both Guides and began to stitch them together as a single flat map. My relationship to driving with the Thomas Guide had been page by page, single snapshots of LA streets. I felt curious to see the pages of the book become a single image.

When I stitched together an entire map of LA out of Thomas Guide pages, the end result measured over 8 x 12 feet. Onto that massive map, I began to hand-stitch over roads where I'd walked or driven, using the stitching to represent my footprint and tire-print on the environment. The stitches would record my complicit impact on the landscape. I'd already been stitching walks from memory and knew that I wanted to do something similar with driving, but wasn’t sure exactly what or how. Would I use the sewing machine – trading one machine for another? Hand-embroidery? I wasn't sure.

I paused on the project due to my uncertainty about how to continue, the complications of another move and a new studio with limited wall space. So, I packed the map up in a project box with the intention of picking it up again later when I had sufficient wall space.

Fortunately, that time has arrived! I'll be moving into a new public studio next week (more details later) which will afford me the space and viewing distance to hang the work and complete it. Here's what I have so far:


Walking and Driving in LA (Work in Progress)
paper map, machine stitching, hand stitching, cotton muslin backing
8' x 12'


Walking and Driving in LA (Work in Progress)
detail

This (still unfinished) detail is only 2" by 4" and represents just a few miles. I'm hand-stitching each of the walks (as I remember them) in shades of green embroidery floss. The darker the shade, the more frequently I walked that particular route. Similarly, I'm hand-stitching the drives in red with the darker shades representing the streets and free-ways I traveled most frequently. I'll continue with this process over the entire map.

Unsurprisingly, I'm finding this piece quite a memory exercise. In remembering how much of LA I covered, I'm overwhelmed by the realization that I was only one person in over 10 million – the environmental footprint each person makes in that (or any) city is tremendous. The enormity of the impact is staggering... and I've only just begun the project.

All Streets, Visual Data and a Narrative Atlas: Tracing my tracks on a short derive through the internet

I belong to an online cartography community where someone posted this compelling image of all streets in the lower 48 U.S.states. The topographical features of the landscape are created by the cross-contour effects of the roads alone. No geographical features were added to this map, and yet, look how clearly defined the Appalachian Mountains are due to the routing of roads that either avoid or hug the ridges. This map was created by Ben Fry, a programmer who transfers data into visual form.

Fry's work made me think of a link that an artist friend recently emailed me: the website of Nathalie Miebach, a sculptor / basket weaver who transforms data (in this case weather and environmental changes) into visual (more specifically aesthetic) form.

And a funny little map from an excellent cartography blog by John Krygier who collaborated with Denis Wood to write Making Maps. The Narrative Atlas from Denis Wood looks fascinating.

The future belongs to them: drifts through downtown, equestrian statues, monuments to shade and reversing nostalgia in a cold place

I have a mental image: a 4 miles square grove of shade trees in the desert... lost objects that never were. And I'm thinking about this passage from Guy Debord:

A friend recently told me that he had just wandered through the Harz region of Germany while blindly following the directions of a map of London. This sort of game is obviously only a feeble beginning in comparison to the complete creation of architecture and urbanism that will someday be within the power of everyone. Meanwhile we can distinguish several stages of partial, less difficult projects, beginning with the mere displacement of elements of decoration from the locations where we are used to seeing them.

For example, in the preceding issue of this journal Marcel Mariën proposed that when global resources have ceased to be squandered on the irrational enterprises that are imposed on us today, all the equestrian statues of all the cities of the world be assembled in a single desert. This would offer to the passersby — the future belongs to them — the spectacle of an artificial cavalry charge, which could even be dedicated to the memory of the greatest massacrers of history...

Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography
Guy Debord
Les Lèvres Nues #6 (September 1955)

As the leaves turn and weather goes cold here in Massachusetts, I'm beginning to change my expectations. I'm no longer that person who lives in a hot climate, but am someone who lives in a cold place... with snow. I have a bit of fear about this unknown thing called 'New England Winter,' but also a child-like curiosity about another way of living and moving about in the landscape that involves things like snowshoe lessons (??) and cross-country skiing and driving with special tires. Compared to my previous experiences, I might as well have moved to a different country.

Not long before moving from Knoxville, TN to Fitchburg, MA, I made an unremarkable walk from my studio to the post office, which is to say I walked from one end of downtown to the other in the heat of the day. As I walked, I became increasingly aware of how much my dread of relentless sunshine (a mental holdover from living in Los Angeles for so long) and the oppressive heat (in which we were to pack up and move house again) was directing my movements through the city.

Being on the academic calendar, Frank and I always move in the hottest months. Three summers ago, we packed up and moved across country from Los Angeles, CA to Knoxville, TN in record heat through multiple desserts. It was a wretched and cursed event involving a car break down in the Mojave Desert and the heat exhaustion of one of our cats, Salvador. Salvador was so traumatized by the heat and sunshine that he, for several weeks after the move, cried and ran away whenever a patch of sunlight came through the house windows.

Like Salvador, I'd become over-sensitized (if not outright traumatized) by years and years of relentless heat and baking sunshine. To survive, I covered with hats and long, lightweight sleeves and searched out pockets of zigzagging shade that I would cross streets to follow. My shade-finding skills had become so naturalized and reflexive that I hardly even thought about them anymore, which is why this unremarkable walk across Knoxville's downtown is still something I'm thinking about.

As I made my way through the streets, my goal of getting to the post office became secondary, and at times contradictory and back-tracking, to the shade-searching desire. Becoming more aware of the impulses that were driving my walk, I started to see how I was always walking ahead of myself, scouting and calculating... the buildings on one side of the street, the overhang on the other, the trees by the sidewalk, the two-block alley, the park with more trees, the archways and courtyard. My search for shade had become an almost obsessive-compulsive kid's game akin to not stepping on cracks.

From this awareness, I began to sketch out mental "shade maps" and "sun maps" of different cities that change with the seasons and times of day. I wondered what it might be like to use one shade map to refer to pathways in another city. I thought about the Guy Debord quote. I thought about taking the Thomas Guide from L.A. and using it to map my way through Boston. The act could be my own "feeble beginning" and play on Nostalgia in that I'd be making visible what I'm already practicing: imposing the past on the future, learning about what is unfamiliar through what is known, designating categories where before there were none.

It would be near impossible for me to drift through any city free of all categories without some severe mental impairment (intentional or not). I mean, I'll continue to know what a subway is, what east and west are, which side the ocean is on... though that one may be easier to upset than other categories since my whole west coast sense of direction was based on my orientation to the ocean and the mountains.

So from this cold place with the ocean on the east, I'm wondering which features of the landscape will consistently navigate me and what role snow will play in directing my drifts through New England.

The City Without Clothes and the 4-year process

For the New Year, I've been doing a major de-stashing -- donating and giving away to fellow artists many fabrics and materials for which I no longer have use. In the process, I've been clearing out some older work as well. Some pieces I'm re-working or mining for materials, others I'm destroying, but many I'm bringing back out into the light of the studio as that's often my process.

I've heard other artists say similar things about their own work -- that from its conception to the final completion, a piece or series often undergoes about a 4-year process. Some ideas are born fully formed, but many need to ferment in a notebook or project box or even sit partially-formed until mature enough to make their way into the world.

Below is one of those works-in-progress that I started while I was still in Los Angeles. It's another in the aerial / psychogeography series. Forgive the dimly lit image.

City Without Clothes (potentials of paradise) work in progress

The materials are velvet, velour and fleece. The colors may be a bit difficult to read in this dim studio image, but they are very vibrant, yet fleshy: reds, golds, purples, browns, pinks and tan.

In the de-stashing, I also brought out small buckets of velvet buttons in some of these colors that I'd like to add to the piece once I get it stitched together on the machine.

A couple of links in reference to the title:

"The Naked City" is Guy Debord's 1957 psychogeographic map of Paris. Here's an interesting English language article with an image of Debord's map (mid-article). The paper proposes contemporary collaborative and digital mapping of usage (rather than the geometry) of urban spaces.

The "Body without Organs" is a deterratorialzing term from Deleuze and Guattari. This Wikipedia entry offers one explanation that's pretty easy to understand.

My work-in-progress is a sort of map to nowhere (as in utopia). It's bodily, bold, joyful and full of hope. It's personal, in that it's potentially everywhere I may have imagined living, but have yet to even visit. It articulates possibilities and parallel lives that have yet to be lived.

Drawing as in walking as in mapping as in writing as in remembering

Here’s an interesting project by Chinese artist, Mengbo Feng. He uses his PDA and a GPS module to draw Chinese characters on city street maps as he walks.

Though the work is very different, the project reminded me of Wenda Gu’s work with Chinese characters and hair. Gu is a Chinese born conceptual artist living and working in N.Y. Several months ago he exhibited an installation that included curtains of hair with characters at UT’s Ewing Gallery as part of the group show Regeneration: Contemporary Chinese art from China and the US.

Gu also exhibited some of this work at the Hong Kong Museum of Art in 2006 as part of a dialogue with Mee-ping Leung, a friend and colleague of mine who came into CalArts the same year I did. We were both pursuing our MFAs when she began Memorize the Future, which grew in size over the years and went on to be exhibited in several venues. Both links show details of the installation which included hundreds of child-sized shoes molded from human hair.

Walking and Remembering

I just uploaded some work from 2004 to the gallery. Here’s the first in the series:


Memory Walk #1, 2004
10” x 12” drawing stitched with hand-dyed cotton yarn on raw canvas

Every evening for years my partner, Frank, and I would take the same walk around the Los Feliz neighborhood in Los Angeles. The walk took about an hour or hour and a half, depending on whether we added an extra loop. We would begin at the edge of the neighborhood where Silverlake and Los Feliz meet at the Rowena reservoir and head straight up the steep end of St. George to the nunnery at the top of the hill, arc back down to Rowena and into Los Feliz where we would wind around until we made our way back to the point where we started.

Most walks included wildlife spotting, usually skunks, but also coyotes and raccoons and the occasional owl. The ritual was playful and heady, a time for us to process our day and figure out problems we might be having with our respective projects.

I miss the walks. I miss the neighborhood. I miss the ritual and the meaning and structuring it gave both of us. But for everything there is an exchange; and now we have bike rides in the morning (as we live right off a shady greenway). And the bike rides have their own delight and meaningfulness and wildlife: blue herons, geese with their goslings and turtles. Still, I miss the walks.

So in thinking on these things, I pulled out these stitched drawings and have been sewing them together to form one large piece.

Here’s the last piece in the initial series and part of the statement posted in the gallery:

Memory Walk #9, 2004

Xs mark the beginning and ending point, which never quite match up because I’m re-walking the route in my mind as I stitch. Each memory is different with stretches of road being a bit longer or shorter and with every twist and turn being at a slightly different angle.

Sometimes the actual walks included an extra loop depending on the evening and my and my walking partner’s energy level. So some memories have the loop and some don’t.

In doing this mapping project, I was drawing a connection between sequential activities (walking, stitching, remembering, narrating) and was bringing a time-based element and the body back into the 2-D map, which is usually static. I was also marking evidence of how repetition or re-telling of a story, even in stitches, engrains a pattern and molds the map to a more ideal (or nostalgic) likeness to the "original" territory.