He wanted her only to answer his question

--Alexander McCall Smith

I actually got this coffee cup...

....by chance when I took a cup of free coffee from the library of my child's school. I was there to participate in Read Across America, and I read a selection from Richard Brautigan's 'Trout Fishing in America' to a class of sixth graders. I was feeling pretty good about all of it, but this cup sealed the deal.

Lucy, Darwin, and Michele

There is a scene in the final episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation in which the character known as Q, who can be alternately omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent and annoying, has dragged the hero, Captain Jean Luc Picard, back to the primordial ooze of Picard’s home planet, Earth. Q explains that they have arrived just at the instant that a chemical reaction will take place that signifies the beginning of all life on Earth. Q pontificates for a few minutes on the unlikeliness of this seemingly insignificant event and how random is the process that will result in the chain of life. At last the moment has come, and Q and Picard look down into the brackish puddle at their feet. “Look…” Q says, “…oh, that’s a shame,” implying that somehow their presence has inflicted itself on the very phenomenon on which Picard’s own existence depends.

In her new installation at Art Produce Gallery, Lucy, Darwin and Me, Michele Guieu uses a quote from Thomas Henry Huxley that could be describing the scene beside that ancient pond:

“Sit down before a fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing.”

In other words, we need to be as open to chance as the things we observe.

When Michele first began to think of how she would fill the spaces at Art Produce, communities were gearing up to celebrate the bicentennial of Charles Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of Origin of Species. “I took it as a sign!” Michele says. The anniversaries have rich connections for her. In the 1970’s, Michele moved from her native France with her geologist father and biologist mother to Senegal where she would live from the age of 11 to 15. They were living there when the ancient set of bones that would be named Lucy (for Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds) was discovered, the oldest known hominid skeleton at the time. For Michele’s family, the discovery was like welcoming a new but highly anticipated friend. “The memory of Lucy’s discovery,” Michele says, “for me is not scientific, it’s uplifting.”

Michele’s connections with the physical world are informed by the scientific knowledge of her parents, but that knowledge mingles freely with the warmth of loving memories of her family and of the peaceful time Michele and her sister spent with their mother and father during those years in Africa. “When we went hiking as a family, my dad was always looking up, explaining the mountains to us, why this stream was over there, and my mom was always looking down explaining the plants.” As much as anything, Michele remembers being surrounded by her mother’s biology books and getting lost in their illustrations. For Lucy, Darwin and Me, Michele has returned to those illustrations as her inspiration, and has chosen a technique that celebrates the randomness of life’s existence. Using sumi ink on paper, Michele allows the ink to set up for a time and then puts the image under running water. The result is gradations of black to gray. “You get what you get almost by chance,” Michele says, “depending on the paper, moisture in the air while it dries, and the timing of the washing.”

The resulting collection of images makes an impressive statement about biodiversity through the cataloging of shapes and textures found in nature. These images are brought together in the main room of Art Produce, along with small photos of the California desert as seen through Michele’s eye, within a large mural. This part of the installation is almost an open letter to Michele’s mother, who at 73, “still wakes up every morning in love with the natural beauty of the world around her.”

The second, smaller room is more intimate. Here is a museum case of artifacts: a rock hammer, a fossil, a sketchbook from her father’s field work—the trappings of a field geologist at work in the Sahara desert. There are loops of digital photography and videos to watch in pieces or in whole. To Michele, the small room works to explain the main body of the installation. One work in there is a video divided into minute-long segments explaining each object in the museum case.

About Darwin himself and his theories, Michele is not ambivalent. “In America,” she says, “we are not done with the discussion about evolution.” In France, where she grew up, society is done with that argument, evolution is accepted as a fact, and people move on. “I was born like that, believing evolution, and didn’t question it. In France, there is no polemic.”

In the video section of Lucy, Darwin and Me, Michele speaks for a moment about each of her father’s artifacts. “Simple, straightforward, not emotional,” she says. “It’s my way of labeling them.” (And her mother is off-screen by the camera, in case you were wondering, holding up Michele’s cue cards.)

Lucy, Darwin and Me opens December 12, 2009 at Art Produce Gallery in San Diego, CA.

She doesn't look a day over forty...

...but she is. She's one of my oldest friends. She lost the pearls from her earrings somewhere along the way, otherwise she's going quite well.

Toward a Sharper Fluid Image

I've reserved my panicking for bigger things, but the outcome is the same.

from the Yale archives: diagram shows how slaves were packed aboard ships

less complicated, better for you

these two pictures

I love looking at these two photographs side by side. Both images, from the Wall Street Journal.

Build-your-own Device for Torturing Fairy Tale Princesses

Make-your-own Model Throne

Print this on 8 1/2 by 11 paper, cut it out, fold it up, and tape it. Then you will have a model throne for you desk, bedside table, dinette, etc.

10 April, 1744

--patrick dillon

--Lemony Snicket

Michele Guieu: C’est la Vie

An installation at the San Diego Art Institute, June 2009

I’ve always loved the expression “You can’t dip your toe in the same river twice.” Everything changes, everything moves on, even when you come back to it in the same place, offering the same bit of yourself to it as you did before. Artists often seem to be taking on two contradictory tasks at once—the preservation of a moment in time, along with a celebration of the fully writhing, changing nature of life itself.

Michele’s second solo show at the San Diego Art Institute has that dynamic. It is both a presentation of her most recent individual works as a painter as well as an installation of beautiful snapshots within a single context. The pieces, all square but of varying sizes and thicknesses, are loosely grouped in thematic ribbons over a large suite of silhouettes that are painted on the walls. The images are not fixed to one another like chapters in a story. If there seems to be only a hint of a narrative here, that is for good reason. They are moments, Michele says, but they are not frozen.

As Michele showed me a preliminary version of the installation you see at SDAI today, we placed the paintings on the hardwood floor of her home. Her children are completely at home with artworks within arm’s reach, and as they made their way in, out, and through the room, they navigated the squares on display as though the paintings were anti-stepping stones. I had to remind myself to stop holding my breath—this is their life, after all, they know what these are. The paths of their bare feet between Michele’s paintings were the incarnation of C’est la vie. Life goes on around you even as you are stopping to contemplate a still life.

With the paintings on the floor, Michele and I talked about an installation we saw in LA last year of handmade stuffed dolls. Each doll had been the result of an experience the artist, Vanessa Matthews, wished to externalize. One doll, for example, was catharsis after anger over a parking ticket. The dolls were individually for sale, but the presentation of all the dolls together, hanging from the ceiling, was most effective. They were funny, cute, sad, and confusing. They were enough of a curiosity that they defied you to leave the room without learning more about them.

Michele feels that the images in this show fulfill a similar need to externalize moments in her life. Most of them have people—sometimes strangers she has photographed at the beach—as the central form. Typically, her landscapes are almost deserted, the ocean is empty. But in this installation, at the same time that her landscapes are like sanctuaries, they make a human connection. Abstract shapes that mimic sea life and tide pools illustrate a bridge between Michele’s mother, a marine biologist, and Michele’s embrace of the natural world.

The clean silhouettes have a way of making Michele’s art look effortless. Does this bother her? When I ask her about it, she says, “The digestion process from photo to painting….is….,” then she looks at the ceiling with outstretched hands. But in the end, that is something only she will know about. “I don’t want it to look like I spend a thousand hours on everything.”

Looking back on Michele’s first solo show at SDAI last year, I am so impressed with how much this river has changed. The change in the scale of her work is most notable, but it is not the only thing that has grown in the year that has passed. Her paintings work together like pieces of a language that is still evolving. As soon as she began to think about this show, Michele says, she knew that she wanted to do something completely different from her previous solo show. She loved the idea of very large scale works, but over time, largeness started to define itself as many small things happening at once. That is life, and to be as large as life is to experience a multitude of tiny moments at the speed they are thrust at us. The great surprise for us is that Michele’s new piece is both the single sweep of the wall in front of you and these many small things that compel you to stop and wonder. The resulting ensemble is appropriately temporary—it will disappear when this wall is handed over to another artist—and the individual pieces will never be presented in this way again.

This is a river. This is life. Michele doesn’t want or need to demonstrate anything. “C’est la vie is about accepting things which are happening without necessarily being resigned,” she says. “I may be less interested in fighting than in finding a way to live in the present.”