There are no stop lights in Los Alamos. The road is reminiscent of those in Utah, I could turn around a team of oxen if I needed to. [and knew where to get oxen] The C Gallery is on the southern end of the strip of town. Its posed as a book end to the little sandwich cafe opposed by the more traditional art gallery and repository the Quackenbush. The owner is Connie Rohde, a retired art teacher from a high school down the road. The gallery came across me about a year ago, through a friend: Matt Chaves. A great photographer living in NYC, hailing from the greater Los Alamos area.

 

My show marked the one year anniversary of the gallery.

 

The experience of working with Connie and the gallery was a very pleasant one. She chose to go out on a limb with me as an artist, since quilts are not the traditional fare of galleries [yet]. I was given the space to create a show and fit it to the gallery. This was a great catalyst for musing and creating and stressful pulling of the hair. I had ample time to design a show and make it from the time she offered me the space 8 or so months ago.

When I was offered the gallery for the month of August I was living in Marietta GA studying Architecture. The school and I were not a fit. Much to the chagrin of my father I decided that pursuing my fame out in the world like a fabled eldest child to see if I buried my gold or spent it or made it multiply. So far it seems that I am a product of the middle option, in the hopes that its actually the way to be the latter option, spend a little to make a lot. Put the money in marketing and booze that’s my motto to success. I left Georgia. Swinging through Asheville NC, the place I hail as home, for a month and sailed off across the country on a road trip to see what I could see [not backwards of course since all my belongings were piled in the back of my hatch back]. Landing in Bend Oregon to live and work on a Llama ranch. That place, which was supposed to be a semi permanent landing point, was short lived due to some arms-folded-hot-headed-family-drama that had nothing to do with me. So I moved in to the spare rooms of the Dance instructor there in Bend, one miss Victoria Tolonen, a talented dancer and gracious host. A month of that and I was offered a place to stay in Sunny San Francisco for the month of June from the lovely and talented Rachel Strickland. Since I was gonna be down there to visit a friend anyway for a weekend the beautiful Annika Herllitz a Swedish Triple threat. After the month of June I was given the keys to a studio in the TL for a steal to live in for the rest of the summer by Aaron Jackson, a Ballet Dancer extraordinaire and one of the kindest people I have the pleasure to know…

[it seems it takes a village to raise an artist.]

 

During this time I had to design and produce a show. I didn’t want to provide the gallery with a bunch of projects that I made just because I wanted to. I wanted to create a show out of current events and for the people who were going to view it. I decided to be lead by the election and the several times that Connie suggested her patrons were conservative as well as my own personal interest. I am constantly interested in icons and iconography. What I didn’t know was what we as a country have besides the ever present flag and eagle to identify us. I wanted to know. I wanted to see what we as a country have to identify us.

The best way to ascertain this was to ask. I made a survey. This survey got sent out through the mailing list of the gallery, and to my friends [and to some friends of friends]. The question of merit was phrased like this:

 

“What person place or thing evokes a nostalgia for America to you?”

 

I added a few other questions to the survey to help me sort the answers into demographics. I had presumed that there would be a lot of overlap and would use the demographics to make quilts of the similitudes. I had made the hypothesis that there would be a lot of cross over.

 

I received around 700 answers to the survey. I realized that my first guess as to the nature of the answers was eronious. About 500 of the answers were individual. Of the remaining 200 there was mostly groupings of two or three. I chose the ones that were answered most to create the show out of, since I couldn’t sew 200 quilts in 6 months. The answer that was the most repeated was pie. It was said 21 times in several iterations, like “pie” and “apple pie” and “the pies on a rack at a diner” the second most repeated was “Flag” so for the first piece I combined those two. The rest of the pieces followed suit. I made 11 quilts for the show, 11 if you count the photo quilt. [I made a photo quilt to represent a small section of the breadth of the answers. I arranged 66 pictures that I took from answers off the list in a quilt formation.]

 

 

I learned that our country is an amalgam of ideas. An open source society. We draw from a wide range of histories and ‘Nostalgia’. I learned as the artist.

 

 

The show went well. I for one had a great experience. I would advise anyone who has the chance for a leisurely drive down the western most coast of our fair country to stop for as long as you can allot in the region of Los Alamos. It doesn’t call out as a destination or demand you stop like LA or The worlds largest Teflon pan, but having spent some time in the area I found that the charm came in the harmony not the bass line.

 

We served Pie and beer and Grilled hotdogs at the opening. Now that is America!

 

 

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 15th, 2009 at 1:40 am and is filed under American Nostalgia. You can follow responses to this entry through the Comments RSS Feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your site.