Liza Lou's Trailer is a walk-in sculpture made in and of a 1949 Spartan Royal Mansion mobile trailer. Themes within are masculinity, noir, stereotypes — all made with beads.
The video has Lou and curators discussing the piece and its transportation and installation at the Brooklyn Museum.
The piece reminds me of a friend's home in DTLA. He owns a 13,000sf building that consists of two floors. The top floor is his living space and the main floor has had rotating purposes in the 15 or so years I've known him.
For much of it, filmmaker Nirvan Mullick lived there, but for another era, they brought in an Airstream trailer and tarted it up into a nice living space, complete with lawn and picket fence. They would rent that out on AirBnB. It was quite interesting to be staying in a trailer and outside your door was a lawn, complete with outdoor furniture and such but then beyond your fence you were in a loft and outside those doors was downtown Los Angeles.
I mentioned the building in my post on Lem Dobbs as it appears in the film The Limey. I spent many nights in this building and I have grand associations of it with DTLA as it and Skid Row were all I knew about the area for many years.
J.A. Young (b. 1986) is a queer photographer / multi-media artist based in the American South. Their work draws on a range of influences, including cultural anthropology, world mysticism, the occult, and paranormal phenomena. Using both personal photographs and public domain archival images as raw materials, Young employs various methods (e.g., spontaneous print manipulation, dramatic recomposition, collage, and rephotography) to transform subtle feelings into tangible visual expressions.
For decades, the two men were lovers and travelers. They shared their own and collected Oceanic Art in galleries and "pop-ups" in over 40 countries. The scrapbooks and journals of their adventures, highlighted in the article, look like fascinating pieces. I wish I had known of them before my visit. I'd have inquired about seeing them...
Anecdote Alert
In early 2020, before returning to Toronto and the Covid lockdown, I visited Esnaar, the South Pacific home of the artists on Efate island. The house was in severe disrepair due to the advanced age of its caretaker, Pilioko (Michoutouchkine passed in 2010).
Near the property entrance, visitors had left their details scrawled on pieces of wood instead of a traditional guestbook. It was a striking first impression that didn't prepare me for what lay beyond the front gate.
Inside, I found Pilioki napping. But he quickly rose to welcome me and my companions and let us explore the property, happily answering our questions. He seemed energized by our presence.
The property was covered in art. The walls, doors, grounds, rooftops... Pilioko seemed to recently become fascinated with one particular shade of yellow, and many items I saw that day were that color.
Various art pieces at Esnaar, Feb 2020Detail, The Water Drummers by Aloï Pilioko, photo by me, February, 2020
I was taken with one painting in particular — of female Ni-Vans water drumming. If you're not familiar with the artform, see it demonstrated here:
I regret not buying the piece, though it would have stood out in my place, where most paintings are abstract.
After reading the White Fungus piece, I searched and found that Pilioko died in October 2020. No cause of death is listed in his obituary, and I wonder if Covid was involved or if the pandemic-induced loneliness (no travel to the island for over a year) affected the artist.
It's been over four years since his death, and I'm curious about the museum's fate. Was there a foundation or trust to keep it open, or has it fallen to developers eager to build on the south lagoon shore? Googling turns up no answers.
A few days after meeting Pilioki, I was having dinner at a friend's place on Mele Bay. My host, Kieran, has an original Michoutouchkine on his wall, and I mentioned my visit to Esnaar. His brother fetched a book on Oceanic Art, which had a chapter on the two artists, emphasizing their significance and foundational role in South Pacific art. Kieran and Brandon, New Zealanders by birth, have had a home in Vanuatu for years and have decorated it beautifully with local art.
Most expats I met in Vanuatu have left, but Kieran still has a home there. I make a mental note to check if he knows what happened to the bizarre live-in gallery, Esnaar.
Old Things Never Die posts a terrific video on the complete restoration of a rusty tin football game. Very detailed, dialogue-free, step-by-step breakdown and reassembly.
Toronto vlogger Maurice Moves with another excellent video, this one on top-notch prep for international travellers. These are great tips that most travellers don't realize they need until it's too late:
Ev Williams (one of the creators of Blogger, Twitter, and Medium) on his new app, Mozi:
Clearly, it would need to be private. Non-performative. No public profiles. No public status competitions. No follower counts. No strangers.
Mozi claims to be a private social network that connects you to people you already know via your contacts list. This may seem a little counterintuitive, but here's a true example from my own life:
I lived in a small town called Oliva, Spain, from September through November, 2017. In the summer of 2018, when I was living in Culver City, CA, I saw a photo on social media of a friend I'd drifted apart from and hadn't seen in 20 years. That photo was taken in Gandia, Spain, in October, 2017. Gandia is the neighboring town to Oliva and my friend was staying just 2KM away from where I was living. In fact, in those months, while I was hiking through Orange Groves, we were closer to one another than we are when we're both home in Toronto.
Had Mozi existed back then — and we'd both been using it — we would have been alerted to each other's presence and been able to make plans to meet.
I'm not normally someone to evangelize for social media, but I do find the purpose of Mozi to be useful and am therefore giving it a shot. At the moment it's only available for iPhone (there's an Android waitlist) and it's pretty much pointless unless your contacts are on it, but I'm willing to give it a shot and see what happens.
One of the most famous bonsai trees in the world, John Naka's 'Goshin' or Protector of the Spirit features a tree for each of his grandchildren. This foemina juniper resides at the National Bonsai & Penjing Museum at the National Arboretum in Washington, DC. It is featured in Stephen Voss' new book of bonsai photographs entitled In Training.
"The day before the Taliban trammeled her freedom, a young woman went for a bike ride."
Terrific long-form piece in Bicycling about female cyclists in Afghanistan after the return of the Taliban. The Taliban of course doesn't want females to ride bikes because the bike seats "threatens a woman’s chastity": The Alchemists by Kim Cross.
Alex Hogrefe is one of the partners there and he's also responsible for the Visualizing Architecture site, which offers tutorials and has a blog, though it hasn't been updated in a few years. You can see some of this gorgeous work below.
