Flash art utilizing my treadmill for Ai Wei Wei's Run For Our Rights campaign that were posted on his Instagram.
North Jetty Swells (32’)
Nearly seven years had passed since I last wrestled God by throwing my amateur self onto a hastily-bought surfboard and into the churn of the NorCal ocean, daring Him to finish me off. I was back again, screaming in His face.
It was the middle of the winter, and I had gone to the North Jetty to witness the 32’ waves that were punishing the coast. The upper dunes were blanketed with spectators cheering on the liquid trains of thunder that barreled in with their indifferent appetite for snatching life. Like a desperate person spotting a bridge without a safety net, I went home to gather some supplies and returned to the water’s edge for a re-match with my maker.
In the valley between the drifts and breakwater exists a fertile swath of sand that, during these king tides, divides its time between being hospitable and deadly. It was there that I decided to pitch my tents and wait for God.
For the next three hours, with my back to the ocean, I defiantly went about my business. I cobbled shelter out of painted parachutes, erected a fake campfire to both boil my water and keep away nighttime predators and then hung my kelp to dry. I ceremoniously fortified the perimeter with the slender tracings of my zen-like rake, all while contemplating the story of the Three Little Pigs. Motorcycles could be heard chewing hills in the distance, while annoying children disregarded my boundary. The tide was rising and, with the waves stacked high upon its shoulders, kept forcing me back out to defend my property line against its salty gentrification.
In my final act of insubordination, I lit it all on fire, recording it on my camera like some trophy that I would later add to the sad photo album of all the places I no longer lived, or rather survived.
The edge of danger is a place I must sometimes go, with swinging fists, to appeal God’s decisions. As before, when together on my board we stitched the waves to the shore with the sinew of our grizzled brawl, he told me his verdict still stood and then showed me yet another way to endure.
Toebin Estates. Homesteading at its finest. A surreal take on self-sufficiency and a nod to Mother Teresa who spent her life in humble service washing the feet of others.
There was a time I stayed in someone’s room and made it mine.
My Pillow Falls: A Comfortable Dreamscape Experiential
My Pillow Falls is an idyllic, sensory dreamscape experiential filled with hand made water features and growth formations that hosts ideas of survival, adaptation, self-reliance and living off the land with what’s at hand. The viewer is transported into an otherworldly environment that, like natural phenomenon, has quietly gestated into an accumulated wonder over time.
May 5-26, 2018
Black Faun Gallery, Eureka, CA
Arts Alive Opening May 5, 6-9pm
Artist Talk Thursday May 17, 6-7:30pm
Black Faun
212 G Street
Eureka, Ca 95501
blackfaunart.com
Domestic Disturbance: : A Surreal Climate Change Experiential
As a military brat I experienced a great deal of displacement. I also experienced many different cultures, landscapes and climates. My childhood years bounced between playing in the sweaty jungles and fort-like military bunkers on post-war Okinawa, to adapting to the unforgiving Arizona desert, where man-made swimming holes pocked nearly every inch of the city’s concrete skin, affording the lie that survival was somehow due to fitness.
There was a lot to see, which was good. There was a lot I did not want to feel. As a defense mechanism, I frequently turned to the landscape of my inner making. Residing there I could keep everything I owned, and no one ever parted. My code was to be self-sufficient. I modeled my lifestyle after Gilligan’s Island, where survival depended upon one’s own creative problem solving and everything was made by hand, preferably of bamboo.
My sculptures and layered installations are an outgrowth of my urge to control my environment by using what is at hand in order to transport the viewer into a physical and psychological landscape of my imagination. Through my works, I try to make the world a better place by giving viewers the experience of awe and wonderment along with a message of empowerment through creative reuse, hoping to inspire others to rely on the self, rather than giving away that power to others.
My recipe for success is this: start where you are with what you have on hand and build from there. Apply yourself consistently. Eventually you will create something grand. Something from nothing. Something like an installation that brings to life the psychological landscape where most of me resides.
December, 2017
Current Works in Progress
Wearables: Nancy Tobin
Photographer: Jennifer Young Photography
Model: Wamuhu Waweru
Location: Moonstone Beach, Trinidad, Ca
Hair Dryers, Sewn Plastic Bags, Rope, Lights, Humidifiers, Timers, Afghans, Rope, Settee, Music Box, Ironing Boards, Coffee Makers, Telephones, Glasses, Ladder, Extension Cords
The Umbilical Cord Series started out as a wedding joke between my daughter and I. I made an umbilical cord with a secondary section that we ceremoniously presented to her groom during the wedding, thereby inviting (allowing) him to join our forever bond. Everyone said yes. Some were more amused than others.
Paper, Staples, Disco Ball Turners, Obsessive Behavior
15x25x12
The Tortilla Blankets and I went on a road trip to San Francisco. They really know how to enjoy themselves.
Wearables: Nancy Tobin
Photography: Jennifer Young Photography
Model: Wamuhu Waweru
Single wave form intersects every room of my house.
Recurrent nightmare of being chased by tornadoes.
I grew up a military brat.
We moved a lot, which explains a lot.
