Riven Rock Refracted – Santa Barbara News-Press
“Word Without Meaning” is the title Tim Brown, UCSB artist, chose for his installation on view at “Riven Rock Refracted,” the gala benefit for smArt Families, a support group that raises funds for the Santa Barbara Museum of Art’s educational programs
MARILYN McMAHON, Santa Barbara News Press- February 9, 2011 5:25 AM
“Riven Rock Refracted” is the esoteric theme for a multifaceted gala that integrates fascinating characters in Santa Barbara’s history, Stanley and Katherine McCormick; “Riven Rock,” local author T.C. Boyle’s fictionalized chronicle about the McCormick family and their famed Riven Rock estate; and how young artists from the UCSB fine arts program interpret different aspects of the best-selling book, which was published in 1997.
In his novel, Mr. Boyle, a Montecito resident, writes about “the depressing story of Stanley R. McCormick, one of the sons and heirs of Cyrus McCormick, the inventor of the reaper, and turned it into a thrilling, romantic, careening tale of love, redemption and the rewards of the faithful heart. It’s no small feat when you consider that Stanley McCormick (who was married to Katherine McCormick, a Boston socialite and suffragist) was a paranoid schizophrenic and sexual maniac who spent the better part of his adult life locked away from women in a lonely, California-Moorish castle — the ‘Riven Rock’ of the book’s title — surrounded by a team of male doctors and attendants who were his only companions for 20-odd years,” according to www.salon.com/books.
The unique event begins at 6:30 p.m. Friday at McCormick House, 1600 Santa Barbara St. Now known as the Santa Barbara Museum of Art’s Ridley-Tree Education Center at McCormick House, the setting couldn’t be more appropriate since Mrs. McCormick gave her former home to the museum with the express provision that it be used for art education.
Included are sculptures; a series of portraits; a piano and vocal performance; mixed media on paper; an installation in a fireplace; a digital video loop projected onto a mixed-media sculpture; and a presentation using steel buckets, water, paper, flora, string and an audio recording.
“For their works, the students had to choose a chapter, a paragraph, a character from Mr. Boyle’s book — whatever resonated with them. We also gave them historical information about the McCormick family from our archives, and they spent time at McCormick House,” said Ms. Hicks. “Frank and Sheila McGinity also invited them to their home, once the theater on the Riven Rock estate in Montecito.
“It was exciting for them to connect with this fascinating piece of Santa Barbara history,” she added.
Tim Brown, one of the artists, was inspired by the following paragraph from Mr. Boyle’s book: “That was how it was, and that was why he’d lived for the past nineteen years at Riven Rock, the eighty- seven-acre estate his father’s money had bought him, in his stone mansion with the bars on the windows and the bed bolted to the floor, within sight of the hammered blue shield of the Pacific and the adamantine well of the Channel Islands, in the original Paradise, the lonely Paradise, the place where no woman walked or breathed.”
Mr. Brown’s installation, titled “Word Without Meaning” in the library at McCormick House, will have books wrapped with multicolored dust jackets with the word “Sex” printed in 10 different languages.
On the threshold of the door to the library, a velvet rope creates a barrier between the viewer and the books, “the metaphor being a world of conjugal pleasure that was denied to the ailing Stanley by his separation from Katherine and all women,” according to Mr. Brown, who will also present a piano and vocal performance featuring popular songs from 1904 to 1947, the years Stanley and Katherine McCormick were married.
Other participating artists are Van C. Tran, Nick Loewen, Ruby Osorio, Emily Halbardier, Jared Flores, Daniela Campins, Nikki Leone, Bessie Kunath and Rimas Simaitis.