Related Activities
About the Artist
Scrapbook
Selected Writings
Press
SubTexts
| Archives |
|
Monday, July 21, 2008 It's a fever you can't resist  Thank you Lacy Matsumoto for the review! and  by Lacy Matsumoto, Advertiser Staff Writer On Hotel Street in Chinatown on a hot, sticky day, the smell of fried noodles and char siu fills the air. Bins full of exotic fruits such as lychee and dragonfruit spill out of the vendors' shops, and shoppers pass quickly by to make their next purchase. Maneuvering between tiny old women holding their groceries, and tourists snapping pictures of the Hotel Street action, the walk to thirtyninehotel's multimedia gallery is full of sensation. The small door between two bars, NextDoor and Bar 35, creaks as it opens onto the steep staircase. The walls of the stairs are littered on either side with photos and press clippings. With each step up the staircase, the installation comes alive; bright colors flash into your line of vision. The tall walls are lined with vivid colors, detail and psychedelic images, contemporary and re-worked vintage imagery. Flowers, ranging from a few inches to 3 feet across, are arrayed across the walls, on the DJ booth and bar area. A 4-foot-tall, black-and-white portrait of a woman draws your focus. The entire room is like a vision out of "Alice in Wonderland." The exhibit, "This Fever I Can't Resist," intends to ignite your mind with its intense visual art. From a distance, Megan Wilson's paisley patterns and retro flowers, strewn across one wall look like a giant display of multicolored flowers. As you step closer, each detail can be noticed, from intricately placed loops creating petals to precisely cut prints in floral shapes. Carolyn Castano's creation on the oppositewall radiates with neon green, yellow and orange stripes. The mirrors in the center of the neon flowers reflect the opposite wall's color, and creates an illusion of depth within the flat-surfaced wall. The black-and-white image of the woman is reminiscent of an '80s pop image, or a Warhol piece. "I've been thinking a lot about the colors and patterns that I see in the city, the urban-scape. I take walks around my neighborhood in Los Angeles and am interested in the way people paint their houses and businesses. Fluorescent colors, neon, hand-painted signs," said artist Castano. "The portrait is inspired by wanting to do portraits of friends, like Andy Warhol, but also like the pop illustrator Patrick Nagel, who made paintings of those chiseled ladies," she explained. Thirtyninehotel's curator Trisha Goldberg was familiar with the two women's work. "Trisha used to be a curator here in SF, so I've known her for years," Castano said. In an interview from her California home, Wilson said of Goldberg: "She's followed my work for a while now. She had asked me who I wanted to work with, and so of course Carolyn came to mind. This installation is the most direct collaboration we've done together," said Wilson. "I've never been to Hawai'i before this; what I knew about Hawai'i came from watching 'Hawaii Five-0' in the '70s. So we really wanted to present something exotic and tropical," said Wilson. "We decided that we'd utilize the walls separately with a few spaces that would collide, and that we'd both use some of the same fluorescent colors to tie our work together." Said Castano: "Megan and I have collaborated about five times on public wall installations and gallery exhibits. We kind of know our groove at this point — what the other person likes and where the boundaries are." Creating these murals was not simple. "I worked on the installation for one week, from morning until when thirtyninehotel opened or sometimes into the night, even, while events were taking place," said Castano. Said Wilson: "We ordered the Nova Color paints and had them delivered to the gallery. The textiles I brought and are things I've been gathering over the years. I had to get all the paint for the stripes locally." Wilson, a San Francisco-based artist in her mid-30s, has been creating art for as long as she can remember. She learned mural painting from her mother. "My mom painted the first flower mural in my room when I was 3. I guess the fruit doesn't fall too far from the tree," Wilson said with a laugh. In recent years, Wilson's full focus turned from making art to nonprofit work in the humanities, and she found a balance. "I'm very detail oriented, and when I'm doing my artwork I get really consumed by it," she said. "I don't think I could do it nonstop. I feel like the work I do with social justice issues is just as important." Sharing something in common, Wilson and Goldberg use their artistic and creative minds for social issues and concerns. Goldberg, who also works for the Hawai'i State Museum, is in support of building the local art scene and bringing awareness to social issues through her art medium. Castano, also is in her mid-30s, is based in Los Angeles. She's preparing for a show with a group of artists from L.A. called the LA Art Girls. An artist since 1992, she studied art at UCLA. "I'm making art, thinking about ideas, and living the dream of an art-filled life," Castano said. "I was 18 when I started, so it was kind of dreamy and not too realistic. Now, I see it as my life. At times it can be a hard path, but other times are very rewarding." Stepping out onto the open patio of thirtyninehotel, and away from the installation, images of "This Fever I Can't Resist" still linger in the summer heat. posted by at 5:27 PM GMT | permanent link A Picture Is Worth ... 27,000 Words! That's right -- that and about 500 hours. OY!  No, it's not my latest novel ... though it feels like I should be receiving some sort of doctorate degree. The image represents all of the work that's gone into Portola Family Connections' Anchor Institution Community Plan. It's part of San Francisco's Department of Children, Family, and Youth's Anchor Institution Initiative.  As the planning consutltant for the project, I've been working on this since last December --1) Developing a framework and timeline for implementing the planning process; 2) Helping to identify key groups of stakeholders to participate in the process; 3) Working with the Planning Team to draft community needs surveys tailored to each group of participants and analyzing the results; 4) Working with the Planning Team to follow-up on the survey results (we collected almost 500 surveys) with targeted focus groups and meetings; 5) Analyzing the results of the surveys and focus groups to prioritize community needs; 6) Working with Family Connections staff and Board to conduct an organizational assessment, including a staff survey and conducting two focus groups to help address the infrastructural needs for supporting the Anchor Institution Initiative; 7) Drafting the Anchor Institution Community Plan with timeline and action steps. So for those of you who wonder what I'm doing when I'm not working on my installations or international projects, now you know. I actually love doing this work; however, I will say this final part of the Anchor Institution process -- tabulating and analyzing the data and developing a community plan based on the results -- has been quite mind altering at times. BUT, the bonus is that when I need to take a break, my thoughts lead me to wacky Web searches on things that I've been wanting to find for years. This weekend, total scores!!! RUFUS AND CHAKA KHAN:  I've been looking for a download of Rufus and Chaka Khan's song Quandary from the album Camouflage for years. God Bless YouTube! I got this album in the early eighties when it came out and loved this song! Like so much of my music from that era, purchased on casette tapes, it's all disappeared. SKYY  How amazing is this album cover?!!! WOW! More amazing is that I finally remembered the name of this band that I also loved and played incessantly. I actually subjected my Dad to 6 hours of Skyy while we drove from Billings to Minot North Dakota. I told Eliza this and her response was "Poor Kemp!!!" Indeed! However, I asked him if he could send me a hint from heaven to remember the name of the band, and he did -- right after I asked, the words "call me" (my favorite song by Skyy) strongly came to mind and that's what led me to finally finding my old love. Even in the after-life, my Dad's wacky sense of humor is fully intact. PLANET PURPLE  Now this might be the best find of the weekend. For years, I would ask people if they remembered the Purple Planet from Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. My recollection was that this was the coolest part of the show, which I wasn't that much a fan -- but the Purple Planet was way worth sitting through all of the creepy characters from the Land of Make-Believe. One person said they vaguely remembered this. I was beginning to think that I'd completely made the whole thing up. But NO! Thanks to Google, I know I'm not crazy (at least on this). It really did exist! posted by at 6:51 PM GMT | permanent link BAY AREA NOW Yes, MIA again... I wish that I could just post entries about my travels or the art projects that I'm working on (or should be), or fun social gatherings, or my social/cultural/political critiques that I tend to post most. However processing my Dad's death has been much more challenging than I thought, given that it was one of the most loving, healthy deaths that one could go through. So the waves continue.  On a lighter note, Bay Area Now opens this weekend. Lots of great work! I will be one of the participating artists of the Galleon Trade: Bay Area Now 5 Edition. Unfortunately, our exhibition doesn't open until September 4th. Galleon Traders participating in the show are: Christine Wong Yap + Yason Banal Jaime Cortez + Maria Taniguchi Johanna Poethig + Peewee Roldan Gina Osterloh + MM Yu Megan Wilson + Poklong Anading posted by at 1:30 PM GMT | permanent link DYKE MARCH 2008                   posted by at 11:30 AM GMT | permanent link YES I DID!!!  posted by at 4:27 PM GMT | permanent link I'm Finally Here! Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh .... it feels so nice to be home with no travel plans for the foreseeable future -- just settling in and catching my breath after the whirlwind of this past year.  Eliza and I have been having a DVD fest. Starting with The L Word. The first 3 seasons were great, but took a swift downturn with the introduction of Papi's character. The whole "competition" with Shane was so ridiculous! And when I went to drop off the videos, the guy at the counter commented that the first few seasons were really good, but "what's up with Papi? She sucks! She ruined the whole thing." Yup! Next Up:  The Diving Bell and the Butterfly directed by Julian Schnabel. An amazing film based on French memoir Le scaphandre et le papillon by journalist Jean-Dominique Bauby. It describes what his life is like after suffering a massive stroke that left him with a condition called Locked-In syndrome. It also details what his life was before the stroke.   Photo by Eliza Barrios On a personal level, I was able to relate to the initial scenes of Bauby's problems with his sight. Earlier this year, I suffered an MS episode that led to the loss of some of the sight in my right eye. It's been hard to describe to people -- I've been describing it as: it would be like having only one contact in. However, the film really caught the experience for me.  Anyway, more on Bauby from Wikipedia: On December 8, 1995, Elle magazine editor-in-chief Bauby suffered a stroke and lapsed into a coma. He awoke 20 days later, mentally aware of his surroundings but physically paralyzed with the exception of some movement in his head and left eye. The entire book was written by Bauby blinking his left eyelid, in July and August of 1996. A transcriber repeatedly recited a French language frequency-ordered alphabet (E S A R I N T U L etc.), until Bauby blinked to choose the next letter. The book took about 200,000 blinks to write and each word took approximately two minutes. It is also how he dictated this memoir. The book also chronicles everyday events and what they are like for a person with locked-in syndrome. These events include playing at the beach with his family, getting a bath, and meeting visitors. The French edition of the book was published in March, 1997. It received excellent reviews and sold 150,000 copies in the first week and went on to become a number one bestseller across Europe. Ten days after the book was published, Bauby died of pneumonia.  We initially watched about 20 minutes of I'm Not There the film directed by Todd Haynes and "inspired by the many lives of Bob Dylan" and I had to turn it off because I found it to be so corny. I tossed it off to my being more literal and preference for narrative. However, the next night, I decided to give it another try -- maybe if I watched more, I'd appreciate it. And I did ... or rather a bit of it. I loved the vignette of Heath Ledger and Charlotte Gainsbourg (though not as any relation to Bob Dylan), it was beautiful and so well done on every level.  However, the rest of the movie was pretty much a hokey mockumentary of Dylan's life with many scenes that are reenactments from Don't Look Back and No Direction Home. Some things are just better left alone! This was the question for Doug Block in his documentary 51 Birch Street. I'm glad he didn't -- an excellent film!  posted by at 10:18 AM GMT | permanent link DON'T DO IT! This is a great article in the July 2008 edition of Vanity Fair by Christopher Hitchens:  However, the "message" from San Francisco is not coming from its City Government. San Francisco officials continue to lop the City's cultural history and identity with the same model of development that's being incorporated in Manhattan. These city plans could easily be compared to Brazil's Rio de Janeiro in which the urban center becomes a gated community for the wealthy and the surrounding areas become the favelas for the poor, who provide the services and cultural entertainment for those with money.  I'm currently writing an article for publication on the discrepancy between what San Francisco has on paper for tenants' rights and the reality. The truth is that the "laws" that are supposedly in place to protect tenants/residents rights are filled with loopholes that the City uses to protect those with money/power. posted by at 10:41 PM GMT | permanent link RETURN FROM THE MURAL OLYMPICS IN HAWAI'I  I got back last week after a rigorous, yet very fun two week installation at thirtyninehotel for my and Carolyn Castano's show This Fever I Can't Resist in Honolulu Hawai'i. We worked with a totally awesome crew of folks, including thirtyninehotel's curator N. Trisha Lagaso Goldberg, owner/executive director Gelareh Khoie, finance director Fatemeh Hajiani, Bar Manager Christian Self, their awesome staff, and artists Nate Balcombe and Allison Uttley. Carolyn and I decided that we can now officially call ourselves mural atheletes (Nate and Allison are still junior varsity). Check it out:  Part of my final install  Part of Carolyn's final install                  GO TEAM!!! posted by at 8:59 PM GMT | permanent link
|
| © Megan Wilson, 2003 |