Gritty Urban Interactive Wear: Alarmed!

 

Does this woman look alarmed?

Well she is!

This fashion statement was inspired by a little gadget called "She's Birdie," a personal safety alarm (pull the ring out and you have a 130 decibel siren and a flashing strobe light). If you've read the news about Oakland, California lately you know that we are teetering on the brink of civil collapse and in a state of lawlessness that rivals those old Westerns we all grew up on. However, the weather is nice and I can't imagine living anywhere else. I decided on a whim to invest in this little budget safety alarm and while I have no idea whether or not it would actually deter a thief I figured it could easily become part of an ambulatory interactive piece.

The Birdie

The first step was converting a prime thrift store find: a gray linen jacket with wonderful pockets but lacking any front closure. I snipped some fabric out of the back side of one pocket (replacing the missing section with scrap fabric) and stitched plackets onto the top front of the jacket to support buttonholes for a pair of vintage buttons.

Jacket front 

The next step was creating a template for the back lettering. I chose Bookman Old Style Font at 188pt, and printed out the letters and punctuation I needed on one 8.5x11 sheet.

Bookman Old Style 188pt

The printed letters were used as a cutting pattern on crafting felt, and the felt letters were then stitched onto the back of the jacket.

Jacket back

Stitched felt letters

More stitched felt letters!

My hopes and dreams for this piece may be overly ambitious. I envision a conversation with one of the many strangers I encounter on my ramblings about town.

Them: You are alarmed? What are you alarmed about?

Me: No, no, this is not a philosophical or political or emotional statement - although I would say if you are not alarmed about the current global situation you would have to be brain dead. This is a simple statement of fact. I am literally alarmed!

I then wave the Birdie dangling from my neck and a good laugh is had by all. Sometimes I even imagine having this conversation with an armed mugger wearing a hoodie. We will see how it goes.

Heading out...

Folding Time With Cake and Cigarettes

 

Anyone else fascinated by the idea proposed by physicists that time doesn't really exist? I certainly am, and spent time reading several dense but informative article explaining the idea from the quantum perspective. . . and then tossed those aside and launched into this ephemeral installation of public art.

Forty or so years ago, I regularly rented a little house on the island of Ios in Greece (before the island had cars, electricity, or running water back in the valley where my house was situated). I kept returning over a period of 20 years, and my landlord was a fisherman so prototypically Greek that he appeared mending his nets on one of the most popular postcards in Greece at the time. I became friends with his family over the years and when Panayiotis asked if I could paint a sign for their cafe at one end of Milipotas beach I said, "Sure!" I asked what he wanted the sign to say and he said, "Cake and cigarettes," which struck me as a sort of quintessential, slightly evil form of word play or poetry. It delighted me. I made the sign and they hung it on the outdoor terrace to lure people in from the beach.

Signs in progress - 2023 time zone

After a trip to the paint store to get just the right shade of Mediterranean blue used everywhere on the islands in the Cyclades, I set out to fold time by recreating the sign and using it as a time travel/ transposition tool. Then I headed out to Lake Merritt in Oakland to amuse myself, engage the public, and outwit the physicists.

An Oakland native tries time traveling

Near the colonnade at the top of the lake, I was trying to figure out where to post the sign so I could then step back and take covert photos of the time warp process. I immediately encountered Darnell, who had settled into a folding chair to enjoy a cigarette. He thought the sign was funny, enjoyed the story behind it, and after posing obligingly for the photo above, became a co-director of the shoot, though he was worried that our biggest problem was going to be people coming up wanting to buy cake and cigarettes. I noted that what I really wanted was a shot of the sign with the drum circle that assembled at the colonnade every weekend, but was uneasy about intruding on that scene., Darnell announced, "Well, those drums belong to me, and I think the sign should be hung on that post right above the drummers."

He grabbed the sign and posted it exactly where he thought it should be.

A good time was had by all, and when the session concluded I reposted the sign just inside the colonnade for a series of people shots.

Click to enlarge

Click to enlarge

Why do all of this? What is the point? Every once in a while when I wake up in the morning the world seems like a dismal, boring, unfriendly place. That is the point at which I turn to public art installations. If nothing else, it makes the world more interesting to me. And I get to meet people like Darnell.

 

A Party in A Pothole

 

You are encouraged to zoom in

Like so much about America, our infrastructure seems to be crumbling - as evidenced by the killer pothole in front of my apartment building that has been trashing tires and wrecking suspensions for over five years now. Mysteriously, it is always filled with water due to a persistent leak that has stumped the city's finest for so long that they finally gave up.

Before

The pothole

To celebrate the 4th of July and all that America is becoming, I decided to turn the pothole into a resort. This hit and run installation project was made far easier by the fact that all of the streets surrounding Lake Merritt in Oakland are closed and barricaded to prevent out of control crowds and any one of a number of unfortunate events. As a result I was able to sprawl in the street while gluing all the little figures into place.

At least five people including a security guard stopped to ask if I was okay during this process, which I guess is to be expected when you are a white-haired woman in your seventies lying prone in the street. Not a single one of them showed even a trace of interest when I explained I was doing an art installation. This is fine with me. My installations are for the perpetually curious souls who tend to see fine detail and wondrous things when they go out into the world. I would be equally happy if I succeeded in bringing even a moment of amusement and puzzlement to one of our neighborhood crows.

The North Shore

Happy Fourth of July.

Installation: Souvenirs of the Bay Area Housing Crisis

Installation in news stand, Oakland, CA

I don't know how people are faring in your part of the world, but here in the San Francisco Bay Area we have an acute housing crisis, with locals being pushed out and homeless camps growing larger every day. Thus this little installation piece in an empty newsstand.

The first step was to create a living room suite. Regarding the dollhouse furniture, I've found you can learn to make anything if you Google it and believe you can.

Creating a little living room suite

The "rug" is from a fabric sample book, the lampshade is from a wallpaper sample book, the table is driftwood. The lamp base is a tiny urn and the table below is a circle of scrap wood atop an old spool of thread. The base supports for table, chair and couch are beads from a sandlewood necklace. The pillows are stuffed with sand so that they have weight and slump more naturally atop the furniture.

Chair

Couch

Lamp

Battery-operated tea light inside of lamp

Driftwood table

I am aware that once installed, this piece will probably be picked apart in short order. I decided to go with the flow on the spontaneous destruction of the piece by the viewing public, and placed a label under every piece of furniture and even the rug, so that the take-away carries a little message.

I also made a  real estate promo sign for the top of the newsstand.

Promo sign for top of news stand

The Installation:

The newsstand I picked is one not yet obscured by graffiti on the front plastic panel, located in a heavily trafficked neighborhood on Lakeshore Avenue in Oakland, right in front of Peets and across the street from Arizmendi. This SF Weekly newsstand is stocked every Thursday, but is usually out of papers by Friday afternoon, leaving it temptingly empty and ready for action the rest of the week.

The newsstand in an ideal location

Installation complete

A view through the front window

With the door open

Close-up

And when we are done installing? Why we just walk away.

Lost and Found: Brush Necklace

The found object: battered makeup brush lying in crosswalk

Time to give another found object a soul and send it on its way. For the back story on this ongoing project and the Japanese folk belief in tsukumogami, or objects with souls, see an earlier post —Tsukumogami: Objects with Souls. For more lost objects in the series see: Found.

I actually walked past this fabulous find in the middle of a crosswalk because I was heading towards a destination and absorbed in the quotidian task of crossing the street. Once I reached the opposite curb, however, it took about three seconds to decide I had to backtrack and grab this wonderful object. In addition to normal wear and tear it looked like it had been run over a couple of times, chipping the paint on the handle, denting the metal, and giving it a wonderful aged patina. Once home, after thoroughly washing it, I studied it for a while until its soul emerged. And here it is.

Brush necklace

The battered, abandoned brush is now a necklace with decidedly tribal overtones.

Close-up, brush head

Regarding the how-to:

The How: A

The How: B

The final step in any of the projects in the Lost and Found series is to send the object back out into the world to continue its travels. Friends fought me on this particular object, urging me to keep the necklace, but my mission is to shepherd lost objects along on their way, not to hoard them. A few objects back I started attaching a card or tag to the objects. Here is the copy for this one:

Card cover

Card inside

Card back (QR code leads directly to this blog)

Necklace with tag

And finally, it was time to let this object go. It was just released at the same crosswalk where it was originally found. I left it, walked to my local thrift store around the corner, and by the time I walked back it was gone.

The release

If you have an eye for detail, you may be wondering what happened to the brush handle. Be assured, I have plans and they are in progress. Stay tuned.