Speculative: installations 1997-2001

Installations created around fictional maps which I drew on a computer. Felt wild and a little radical back in the late 1990s. Freeing: I could undo all my "mistakes," which helped decrease the critical noises in my head (my internalized verison of voices of those cranky old white men, my teachers? perhaps!).

The installations included heavy use of digital drawing software, tons of inkjet printing, and often screen- and digitally printed textiles, fluorescent lighting, and furniture fabricated for the particular installation.

A Brief Message About Containment

Brooklyn Museum, 2001

A free-standing installation with a trapezoidal footprint. Visitors could slip inside the curtains at the narrow end. Those hanging globes that look like lights? They're pillows!

Much of the labor of this piece was organizing fabricators — quite a challenge to find a printer who'd digitally print onto cloth (the maps on ABMAC's interior) back in 2001. The outside repeat pattern was screen printed onto a lovely peach colored silk at Zoo Ink in San Francsico.

Don't Forget to Ask For Directions

PØST, Los Angeles 1999

Phenomenal fun + extravagent, covering most of the gallery floor with digitally printed tiles (sandwiched between plexiglas and plywood). So much yellow! The scooters were fabricated by a brilliant grad student at Stanford where I was a visiting artist. I printed all the paper parts of DFtAfD at Stanford, otherwise this wouldn't have been possible for me.

(I gave one of the scooters to the grad student + his family as a housewarming present when they moved into their place in Altadena. It burned up in the fires, along with so many houses.)

After the installation of DFtAfD came down, I collected all the documents I'd created while designing — including things like the laser cut layouts — into a very limited edition book. The book is essentially a manual for re-creating the installation and includes pop up models and paper dolls. The book looks fairly machine made, because of the computer graphics but was very, very hand made, with a hand-embroidered title. The continents page, below, was one large spread in the book.

Always In a Hurry, Never Gets Lost

Southern Exposure, San Francisco, 1998

Above, the planning drawing, that was used for the card.

Below, a photo of the installation (back when Southern Exposure was still at Project Artaud.) A little messier IRL.

2 Standard Stops

Installed in a (functional) industrial elevator

PØST, Los Angeles, 1998

A New Game

PØST Los Angeles, 1997

Alas, the photos of the actual installation were murky and low resolution. So I'm sharing images of what I printed to make the installation. A New Game covered nearly the entire walls of PØST's smallest space and parts of the floor.

The floor pieces, continuous with the wall imagery, were not meant to be stepped on. To make them, I mounted laminated digital prints onto 1/8" polystyrene which was mounted onto 1/2" dark gray foam. I was really into plastics and artificial information at the time.

Above, west wall. The floor strip is the tilted boxes and pink map.

Below, east and south walls. The floor strips are approx. the bottom fifth (with the big inverted V which disappears when the south and east floor parts touch) and an "island",

North wall.