Small Work for a Small Space

I am thrilled to announce that my collage piece "Repair" has been accepted for the upcoming show Small Work for a Small Space at the Red Door Gallery and Collective in Oakland!

The reception is on March 6 from 6-10 p.m. and I'd love to see you there. You can see the address in the "Events" section of my blog. The piece will hang through March.

This will be my first showing at an art gallery, and it is doubly exciting that this piece was chosen, because it holds special meaning for me. I made the piece last summer while I was learning about Terrapsychology and writing a paper about the local landscape and what it might want to say to us. After spending some time by the side of the road near the former site of the Concord Naval Weapons Station, I heard this: "Repair. Restore balance."

This land, which appeared pimpled by abandoned bunkers, is blocked off by tall chain-link fences. No one can even approach it. It's sealed off from the healing it needs.

Here's an excerpt from the paper I wrote last summer, which had a piece about this land:

"'Repair. Restore balance.' Quite an appropriate message from a land that has been abused and neglected. The Concord Naval Weapons station was established in 1942 to store weapons. In 1944, the marine area was the scene of a massive explosion that killed more than 300 men when a munitions ship exploded. Two-thirds of the men were African American. Surely, this had a devastating effect on the land, and since it became a weapons station it has endured enormous change, death, contamination, and neglect. The Naval Weapons Station was deactivated in 1999 by the military, and in 2007 it was declared 'surplus property,' giving the City of Concord a chance to develop or conserve the land.

What has happened to the land here is truly a microcosm of what has happened to the land across the globe. And our destruction of the land does not just affect the land--it directly affects us."

The City of Concord chose in January to use 65% of the land for open space and parks, with the remaining space going to community facilities, a satellite campus for CU-East Bay, and commercial and residential use. It will be interesting to see how the land feels during and after this transformation.