size variable | watercolor and white tape on cut white paper with thread and nylon netting | 2006 | Solo Exhibition | Raid Projects | Los Angeles
Having moved to Los Angeles from San Francisco just over a year ago, I found L.A. surprisingly unsettled. After months of readjustment, living at the northern-eastern fringe of the city, a sense of place began to settle in. I started to read the city as a network of sectors interconnected through its highways. The whole couldn’t be absorbed the way other cities can. For me, Los Angeles stands as a frenetic and disjointed place. Without an obvious city center, I found its true heart to be its free-ranging network of arteries — its highways and thoroughfares. The circulatory system is an entity unto itself, a city defined through its driving.
This spring, as the winter rains began to ebb, the city’s typically parched earth gave way to a lush ecosystem of abundant plant life. In particular, during the month of May, pervasive stalks of Black Mustard blanketed the L.A. terrain in swaths of lemon yellow flowers that interconnected the city’s disparate sectors in an alternate way to its highway system. A sea of gold meandered through neighborhoods and into vacant lots, pushing through cracks, brushing against highways and buildings, creating its own ulterior network. Its short-term pervasiveness both brightened L.A.’s widespread shabbiness and even out-shone some of its winsome landscaping. The city, in a sense, surrendered to a temporary overtaking — a homogeneous substructure of invasive beauty.
This perception of the City of Los Angeles during the month of May gave way to my installation at Raid Projects, White White Mayday in Mustard and Gold.
I had originally intended to integrate the Fibonacci number series, using the Golden Rectangle as some sort of underlying principle for the work. However, my turbulent process quickly unraveled the initial concept. While holding loosely to a Golden Rectangle visual dynamic, any strict adherence broke down into a deconstruction of it. My continual persistence resulted in a haywire attempt to maintain some balance and unification through a cacophony of drips, blossoms, and spiral nautilus-shell-like offshoots of white paper, white tape, and watercolor. The process aptly mirrored the particular energy and structure of my direct environment. A type of compositional maelstrom resulted, tempered by the golden explosion of mustard blossoms — “Mayday” pertaining to my frenetic emergency as an artist creating work for an impending exhibition, as well as a new Angeleno assimilating into an idiosyncratic environment during this particular month of May.