The Textures of the St. Johns Bridge

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I rode down to Cathedral Park under the St. Johns bridge here in Portland today. I live only a few blocks away from this park which stretches along an industrial patch of the Willamette River; yet for long stretches, and for no reason at all, I rarely visit.

I've begun to change that recently. I hop on my bike every so often in order to aimlessly scoot down to the river. It's become a more lively place in recent years, partly due to neighborhood gentrification, but also because the city has made a big effort to convince people that the river is a safe place to recreate. There's a little swimming area where kids and dogs play in the hot weather, and a fallow-seeming little beach where parents plop into lawn chairs and clandestinely sip wine from plastic cups.

But this fall feeling is official. Today there were no swimmers, only fishermen on the long dock that stretches out into the river, under the iconic bridge.

The iconic bridge.

I typically don't bother taking it's picture, as a few other people already have that covered. But seeing things through the viewfinder of a point-and-shoot has helped me to synthesize my environment and has forced my engagement with detail in the past. So after putting the camera down for almost a year, I've picked it back up again. Before I knew what I was doing, I was taking pictures of the bridge. And then before I had a chance to think about it further, I realized I was taking pictures of the bridge without the actual bridge in it.

A New Project
I'm embarking on a new, personal project. It will be something of a time-based project covering 365 days, starting today. I'm not going to go into too many details about it here and now, but I'm sure you will notice it, as a good deal of my recording of it will be here on this blog. The important things are that it a) comprises much of the other, more public work I will make throughout the year, and I b) may not record things here every day, but I will be keeping a running journal that I hope to update frequently, and it c) is very much about personal and artistic growth and how this growth informs my regular art practice.

honey and health food : part two

This is the second part of the short story I began to retell here, last summer. This is background for the Bend Project...there's so much I could write about my perception of that town.

Place, and perception of place plays a huge role in my work. I'm fascinated by places in flux and/or in stasis. I'm fascinated how place is defined - by its inhabitants and by its outsiders. This fascination (not necessarily the content of this story) is the basis of my upcoming work about Bend and Central Oregon.

note: I've removed names of places and people, simply because I don't feel they need to be implicated in my own rendering of the town.

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Eventually, my family moved to a different part of town, and life sped up. My mom joined the work force, and my brother and I were adolescents with no interest in the slow food philosophy that our small town health food store exemplified. Our family rarely ate together, and grocery shopping became dominated by foraging for frozen foods. By the time I was in high school I had all but forgotten my hippie roots and the days of the health food store; the sunlight coming through handmade curtains, the creak of old hardwood floors, and the smells of bread baking and sprouts sprouting and of yogurt being made.

me in 1996 outside the health food store

Bend, OR. 1996. Population: 55,000

I've just arrived in town in a VW beetle four years older than I am with two large tropical birds, a black cat, and a boyfriend. We've come from a tiny southern Oregon town where I'd been working what had meant to be a simple summer job, but had turned into a fiasco involving the DEA, the INS, and the Montana Militia, and which had lasted until December. Bend has become a mecca for a great number of people. Skiing, mountain biking, rock climbing, white-water rafting, you can do it all in Bend. You can’t, however, find a job. Especially if your last known work number has been disconnected.

After two months of pursuing the lowliest of jobs: dishwasher, janitor, golf-club assembler, and being turned down left and right, I suddenly remembered the health food store.

The quintessential mom and pop store had evolved with the town. Now simply called by the owner's last name, they catered to the new wealth that had been coming en masse to Bend since the late 1980’s. The little shop's specialty was now wine, a gourmet deli, and organically grown produce hand selected by the humble husband/owner. Gone were the dirt roads and in their place were busy thoroughfares complete with parallel parking and bike lanes. Gone were the juniper trees and volcanic ash of the hill behind the store, gone were the caves and forts and hiding places of children, and gone were the graves of many of their beloved pets. In their place were townhouses, condominiums, and multi-million dollar mansions. The merchandise area of the store had been replaced by a new, high tech produce case, and the ice-cream freezer no longer held yogurt push-ups but a cornucopia of gooey Ben and Jerry’s flavors. I now had to go to the health food store across town to get bulk honey, the little health food store that could was the only place in town where you could get bamboo shoots or pig’s feet from Mexico.

One thing that hadn't changed were the owners, who still lived in the apartment above the store. But now a short, elaborately coiffed and theatrically painted woman managed the store. She apparently liked me when I came in. I was barely interviewed before being hired.

She had worked as an actress in Chicago, and she taught me how to play the part of the retail clerk - how to separate yourself from the role in order to prevent insanity. It wasn’t easy though. A new kind of clientele had been keeping the store alive over the years, and it pained me more and more each day to be pleasant to the horrible, bored housewives who were either lonely and just wanted to talk, or hell-bent to make every service worker’s life miserable by being miserable themselves.

I discovered that I loved working with the produce - arranging it to look the most appealing to customers is an artform!

Old friends of my parents started popping in to the store, too, once they learned that I was working there. People that I remember hanging around our house nearly every day when I was young, but who my parents rarely see anymore. Our store was notorious for having a very liberal wine tasting policy, and many of these old friends would come in on the pretext of getting lunch, but would usually only pour themselves a generous glass from whatever bottle was open, and I would sit on the front porch with them on the hot, slow summer days, getting to know them now that I was an adult. I got to know that they were alot like me, mentally in their early twenties, transient and uncertain.

Summer rolled on, and I rode my bike around a lot, drank beer, got my heart broken and broke a heart, and then one day in September I woke up and it was cold. Bend has no spring or fall - when the wind blows down from the mountains it's time to hunker down and prepare yourself for six months of deep freeze. Summer had been too short for me. I'd planned to save money and move away in the fall, but I hadn't saved, and I didn’t even know where I wanted to go. I wasn't mentally or physically prepared for another winter in Bend. I had no car, which meant I was going to be riding my bike 10 miles a day through slush and ice and snow if I wanted to keep my job.

I'd like to switch gears just a little and tell you a story. Something that has to do with a moment in time when I was young and a tiny light turned on, or a latch was unbolted in my brain that allowed me to think that I would one day be an artist.

I grew up in a small Central Oregon town, and when I had just turned 11 my parents took my brother and I on a trip to Portland to hit the museums and to eat in a good restaurant and to soak up a little culture. One of the highlights for me during that trip, aside from staying on one of the uppermost floors of a downtown hotel and being giddy with the lights and thrill of the sounds of the street below, was the Portland Art Museum.

brother and sister, too cool to have their picture taken, on a cultural excursion,

taken outside of the old OMSI circa 1986.

A couple of things happened to me there, transformational experiences - the first of which was seeing the girls and boys with punk rock hairdos coming and going. I believe at that time what is now the Pacific Northwest College of Art was the Museum School, and students would have been milling around. I wanted to immediately go home and bleach my hair platinum like the black-clad girl in witch boots in line in front of us at the entry.

The other was that my parents had the insight to set my brother and I free to go our separate ways and to wander the museum by ourselves, to discover what we could in our own way. After a time and location was determined to regroup, the four of us broke apart and let the compass of our own personal curiosity pull us.

Eventually I found myself in a long hall lined with black and white photographs. Photographs of orchids, female nudes, and muscular, naked men. I don't remember specific details. I couldn't today, for the life of me, recognize what photographs I saw that day; but I later learned that they were the work of Robert Mapplethorpe, whose photography became the center of the public's attention when The Corcoran Gallery of Art in D.C. refused to show his more controversial series, The Perfect Moment, and whose name was frequently invoked when the spending habits of the National Endowment for the Arts were questioned.

I have a feeling that what I saw that day was a fairly tame sampling of Mapplethorpe's body of work, but it showed details that certainly made me curious; and made me slightly embarrassed to be looking at them closely. I honestly wasn't sure how I was supposed to react. At once thrilled, slightly titillated, and also engrossed in the beauty of the images, I felt a little unsure of whether I should be looking at them at all. I felt painfully aware of my age - was this appropriate? I was both assured and mortified when other viewers, adults, entered the room and looked at the images. I have a very, very vague recollection of a parent and child entering and quickly exiting again.

I circled the hallway and came back when the other visitors had left. I surreptitiously eyed the photos again and again, moving forward casually when others entered the space. I believe I left the area entirely, only to return a while later, lured by the graphic, secret nature of what I was viewing - but also its beauty.

What strikes me in retrospect is how lucky I was to have been able to experience that moment, alone, in an art museum. I feel as if museums can be, should be, places of safety and sanctity. By that I mean - where judgement is allowed to be suspended, and where we are given the chance to trust our own intelligence. By safety I mean - a place where a young person, or any person, can view something challenging, perhaps something altogether not safe, and consider its validity as art, or not. (I know that may seem to be a contradictory definition of safety.) The safety and sanctity of the museum that day allowed me the opportunity to have one of my first critical evaluations regarding "what is art?" and "how do I feel about this?" In fact, the way I felt that day was that art could be very powerful, and wildly different than what I might imagine, and that it could excite me to think about things in an entirely new way. This little moment seeded my desire to become an artist.