We Are All Party Animals

I found this post buried deep in my drafts. I never published it for some reason. It's a write-up for We Are All Animals. I wrote it right after I got back to LA. Enjoy!

Wow. We finished installing on Thursday morning, but my legs and feet are still sore from climbing stairs and ladders all week and walking around the gallery barefoot. I was so immersed in the process that I forgot to eat and sometimes drink water, but every minute of it felt so good that I didn't even feel hungry or thirsty. I definitely felt tired by the end of each day, but it was such a triumphant tired that I didn't even want to rest. It was especially hard to sleep because we slept in the gallery the last three nights and all I could think about was the insane amount of work that needed to be done, and I still kept coming up with ideas whilst dreaming or falling asleep.

All the little details were my favorite. Alec's bird houses perched in the upstairs bathroom, the water feature running in the bathtub, taken from the parking lot. It's normally used for rerouting water to prevent flooding, but Alec wanted to have a fountain in the upstairs bathroom greenhouse. Kat bear's blue patchwork curtains! All of our ground score trinkets scattered about the space. I was especially proud of my little cardboard stalagmites, my only contribution to the downstairs bathroom cardboard cave. Speaking of which, can I talk about cardboard for a minute? I don't think most people realize how amazing of an art material it is. It's completely free, it's malleable, it comes in so many beautiful shades of brown, the texture is earthy, warm, and soft. It can be used as a drawing or painting surface, but you can also use it to build a structure, a monolith. It is both utilitarian and useless. Sorry, but I must give credit where credit is due.

I also must give credit to the night time and the streets of San Francisco. For without these two things, we would not have acquired 80% of the material that was used in the show. The sheer volume of "stuff" that we found while walking around was ridiculous, we could have had a show with just the stuff we salvaged! In fact I think that's probably going to be my next project. I mean, it was amazing to be able to find the bulk of our building material, but also the items that we found were simply beautiful and curious. Kat bear and I piled up a few of the small things we found and arranged them neatly in a shallow wooden box and glued and nailed them in place. That was one of my favorite pieces that came out of the show.

I'd say that there was just as much work produced during the installation as there were pieces brought to the gallery ready to hang. Both were incredibly strong and beautiful, and together they made the space remarkable.

All in all, we made our mark and we partied hard and we are happy.