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.

–Kate Watson, …mightbegood

So the story goes like this. When my father, Jim Brown, who was the first in our family to go to college, took off for school in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, and during his time in college, gave away all of his childhood toys in an attempt to be an adult. He married my mom, Sara, in 1963, and they gave birth to me in Tulsa in September of 1968.

In 1972, at the age of 32, Dad went to a used book store sale at a local private school. It was there he found a book he had loved as a kid, called “Gene Autry and the Thief River Outlaws,” and he bought it for a dime. He was happy to reconnect with his past, and the idea of getting something so dear to him for so cheap a price was really appealing to him.

It was around this time that the Tulsa County Flea Market started about a mile from our home.

From that point on, my Dad was hooked, and Mom was an active accomplice. They filled our house with furniture, wall hangings, and porcelain product signs, the latter of which my dad was particuarly interested. In what was probably a monumental find for the both of them, they contacted and were given access to their childhood soda fountain, called the Crystal Palace in Muskogee, Oklahoma. I grew up around a lot of memorabilia from the Crystal Palace.

We would normally go back to my father’s hometown of Harrison, Arkansas every summer for at least a little while to visit my Great Grandmother Clara Belle Duckworth, who was still living there. Junk malls would be everywhere along the way, and the normally three and half hour trip would sometimes take eight. Initially, I was miserable waiting in the car while Mom, Dad and sister worked bargains. But then I got it: start collecting, and get out of the car and start looking around for bargains instead of staying in the car and sulking. Baseball Cards were my first love, and then antique dogs, and then stamps, and then Batman memoribilia, then vinyl LPs, then musical instruments, then antique postcards, and all through this time, action figures and figurines.

“Generations” is an antique mall in Tulsa where my father has a booth currently. Yep, I stole the name of the mall for my show, but the owners of the mall didn’t even name it themselves- it’s from the previous business, which was an antique furniture store. They merely covered parts of the outside sign with a banner that has new contact information, and kept the previous name in tact. Like the title, everything in this show is borrowed; the only thing I’ve done is rearrange it.

The Sports Center- My first big dream was to be a pitcher in the big leagues. This was obviously not to be. After a little league game that had me walking in seven runs as the pitcher, I learned that you can’t be anything you want to be in this world. I still had a glorious vicarious season in 1979 as a fan of the Pittsburgh Pirates, who ended up being World Champs that year. Being in Tulsa, I didn’t really feel geographic affinity for any major league club, so I just went with who my older cousin liked.

Dog Sculpture- Like my Dad, I’m a big fan of dogs, especially when I was a kid. In one of those short-lived obsessions, between the ages of ten and twelve I collected completely worthless Dog figurines that I would arrange in type trays in my bedroom. Until recently, I kept them wrapped in yellowed newspapers dating back to the Iran Hostage Crisis. I always wondered why I never got rid of them. I guess it was because I was going to build this.

Action Figure Pyramid-With action figures, as well as a lot of the toys I had, the more beloved they were, the more obliterated they ended up being. Some of my favorite toys were played right out of existence. Here are all that remain.

American Flag- Sewed by a Great Aunt, but I don’t know who. Forty eight stars, so it must be before 1959.

Mad Magazine Paperbacks- These paperbacks were presented en masse by my father to my sister and I before we took a long road trip to Ghost Ranch in New Mexico sometime in the late seventies. I remember my father saying that it was an 800 mile trip, and for my sister and I, this was plenty of time to thoroughly loathe and despise each other. But on this trip, Dad gave us the paperbacks, and instead of the requisite yelling and screaming, we shared laughs. Stroke of genius.

Lunch Boxes- All used in elementary school. On the bottom of each one there are two parallel marks that are rubbed down to the metal. This is from the practice we as kids had of sliding our lunches down the long hall to the cafeteria to see who could get closest to the hand washing we would do before standing in line for lunch.

Cancelled Stamps- My Aunt Mary, who was my Grandmother Cranks’s sister, was a little kookie and even though she was a very dynamic personality in her youth, I only remember her as a perpetually miserable person with clinical hypochondria. I didn’t like to visit her unbelievably messy house in Muskogee, but when I did, she would give me a letter envelope filled with cancelled stamps she collected for me. I never had the heart to tell her that cancelled stamps weren’t worth anything. Here they are collected in a tribute mandala to Mary.

On the Table:

Navaho Blanket- bought by my parents while they were teaching on the Navaho Reservation North of Gallup, New Mexico, sometime between 1963-1967. I’d like to believe I was conceived on the reservation, but my Dad doesn’t agree with that assertion- more than likely, it happened in their small apartment in Gallup. The moved back to Oklahoma soon after my mom learned of her pregnancy.

Dictionary- owned by my Grandmother, Ruth Crank, a public school teacher who kept it in every classroom she taught, Muskogee, Oklahoma.

Candy Dish with Assorted Buttons, Safety Pins, and Sewing Needles- owned by my mother, Sara Brown when she died in 1999, Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Electric Lantern- Used by my grandfather, James Alexander Brown, when he was a Conductor for the Midland Valley Railroad, 1970s, Muskogee, OK.

The show involved a three-cubicle installation, one large painting of 200 portraits, a grid of sixteen log book sketches I had drawn as I spoke to Houstonians on the phone, and recordings of some of the phone calls I had taken over the two month period.

Here’s the show statement:

As with everything, this show started small. There I sat , in Austin, summer of 2003, hunched over a cubicle at a dead-end call center job, drawing pictures of tombstones on Post-it Notes while I talked with people about cancer. I was miserable.

Then I took a call from a woman in Dallas. A Talker. A gum-smacking Talker who would not shut up. I’m a extremely patient listener, but this woman was driving me up the wall. I picked up a pen and drew a woman with a big mouth, then I drew another woman with a bigger mouth, then a bigger mouth. The more she talked, the more I drew, and the bigger her damn mouth became. It made me happy, like I was controlling the exchange somehow. We ended the call, and I had a drawing.

My next day off, I bought a sketchbook and a couple of black felt tip pens. I drew a grid of eight rectangles on the page, and whenever I had a chance during one of the 35 or more calls I took a day, I drew what I thought the caller looked like on the other side of the line and noted the city from which they called. When I finally quit my job six months later, I had two hundred and fifty portraits. The large painting here is the culmination of that sketchbook series.

At some point, I realized that talking to strangers wasn’t the reason I was miserable at my call center job. I was miserable because my job dictated what I had to talk about, and that meant not being myself. What if I removed all of the “jobbiness” of taking calls from the public and just interacted with strangers with my own rules? Nothing to sell, nothing to say, no agenda, no answers, no questions, no needs, and no rules. What would that feel like?

The Listening Post was born. For the last two months, I’ve advertised a toll free number with a variety of messages in the Houston Press and on Craigslist. I’ve gotten quite a few calls, and have drawn portraits of the callers and taken notes during our interactions. For about a month now, I have recorded our conversations (with their consent) and I’ve realized that The Listening Post isn’t just an intake process- it’s also a performance.

People like to think that they need an expert to figure things out for them. I do- that’s why I listen to Fresh Air and watch Judge Judy and pay for someone to do my taxes. But after having talked through a lot of problems with people these last two months, I think all we really need is to have someone listening.

If you need to talk, I want to listen. 1-877-EARS KNOW.

The show at Green Papaya Art Space space in Teacher’s Village, Quezon City opened last Wednesday to a great crowd from the Filipino Arts scene. I was really stoked to show at Green Papaya because it is another artist run gallery half way across the world, and it wasn’t surprising to find that these weirdos on the art scene are just like my homies back in Austin: humble, hospitible, and interested in contemporary art from a global perspective– I have to say, however, that Green Papaya is ahead of Okay Mountain in presenting TransMedia art to the unsuspecting art public of Manila.

The Artists are:

Heyd Fontenot and I barely knew each other before the trip began, but I just knew that he would be a great traveling companion– all of these thoughts have been confirmed since we’ve arrived. He just completed a whopping eighteen large paintings at his residency in Newfoundland, and brought at least four of them for the show here. His sultry portraits of friends in the Austin scene are equal parts portraiture, abstraction, and design.
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Louie Cordero’s, stuff, to me, is perfectly Filipino: dense, colorful, and beautifully grotesque– he is a butt-kicker to be sure, showing at Jonathan Levine Gallery in New York, Giant Robot in Los Angeles, and being one of the 13 young contemporary artists who were honored by the Cultural Center of the Philippines. As I start to blog, you might keep an eye on the list of these thirteen, because many of these artists form a tight knit clan that forms part of the contemporary scene in Manila.
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Mariano Ching is another of these thirteen, and before I came over I had no idea what his stuff would look like because of his minimal web presence. But what he brought was awesomely original and surprising– I knew when he brought his stuff in that we would have a BIG show with many looks and lots of ideas floating around. I need to get better photos of his smaller works, but below is one of the paintings he exhibited.
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I had brought an installation in a duffle bag with me (weight 26.7 pounds, according to the Amtrak scale) and nine small pieces– I had a ridiculous amount of work to do when i got here, so my first week was spent painting at Louie’s studio finishing paintings and hanging out with he and local rock/ art icon Romeo Lee

That’s all I have for the time being– gotta go tourist for awhile in the city– check back soon.

The L_M_N_L will be opening it’s doors on Saturday, July 28th to do an evening of improv music– check it out starting at 7pm– if you haven’t gotten a chance to check out the show, this is probably going to be the last chance you’ll get– it has a little of everything– collab paintings, sculpture, video, collage, a staircase on wheels, and most importantly, a re-ordering and recontextualizing of the space as it used to exist. This picture depicts the beginnings of a larger installation that I hope to complete later this year when I show in Manila. Click on the picture, and it will take you to the Gallery of other images showing this weekend, that is if we don’t sell them off the wall first.

AN EVENING OF IMPROVISATIONAL MUSIC WITH BROET AND GUESTS WITH VIDEO PROJECTIONS BY VIRTUAL LIFE MEDIA

Saturday, July 28th 8pm at the L_M_N_L art space
305b East 5th Street (east of San Jacinto)

For more on Broet, visit myspace.com/lesserbroet

One of my oldest friends in Tulsa, Susanne Barnard, asked me if I wanted to do a mural at the Living Arts gallery in downtown Tulsa as part of their Day of the Dead celebration– I thought it would be fun and meaningful to do one about my mother, Sara Lynn Crank Brown, and invite my younger sister Celia to do it with me– it was great to go through old photos and remember mom, share some funny times and sad times too. We still miss her greatly, but the pain isn’t so sharp after seven years. In other words, it was the right time to do it.

On the mural I did of mom rising up out of her wheelchair (Celia said “She always hated that thing.”) and into the light, I put the words of a family song that we sing during family reunions (at least I think we still do, I haven’t been back since she died.):

I know it’s true, it’s oft time said
That when you’re dead, you’re long time dead
So I’m going to live in high ’til I die!

The song is actually about a black man who, when faced with having to live a life preparing for heaven or one that samples the secular joys of earth, decides in one huge rousing chorus that life is meant to be lived big, heaven be damned. My interpretation is slightly different from that: with these words I am thanking mom for encouraging me to live life as though we only have the chance this once, and from that point, all bets are off. No use in waiting for an uncertain future when it is all here now.

In addition to the photos and mural, my former wife Jenny Hart, who absolutely adored our mother, agreed to let us use the memorial embroidery that she gave to Celia shortly after mom died.

My second cousin Greg Gray took this fantastic photo of a mother with child in baby carriage surveying the installation- birth and death come full circle in a single moment– many thanks Greg.