Category Archives: Uncategorized

city of angels

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Then a miracle occurred. One of the last angels lingered, turned, and quietly approached me. I caught sight of his cavernous, staring, diamond eyes under the imposing arches of his brows. On the ribs of his outspread wings glistened what seemed like frost. The wings themselves were gray, an ineffable tint of gray, and each feather ended in a silvery sickle. His visage, the faintly smiling outline of his lips, and his straight clear forehead reminded me of features I had seen on earth. The curves, the gleaming, the charm of all the faces I had ever loved—the features of people who had long since departed from me—seemed to merge into one wondrous countenance. All the familiar sounds that came separately into contact with my hearing now seemed to blend into a single, perfect melody.

He came up to me. He smiled. I could not look at him. But, glancing at his legs, I noticed a network of azure veins on his feet and one pale birthmark. From these veins, from that little spot, I understood that he had not yet totally abandoned earth, that he might understand my prayer.

–Vladimir Nabokov, “The Word,” trans. by Dmitri Nabokov

shanghai saudade

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This past April, Machado went back to Shanghai for the first time since 1946, accompanied by her husband, her daughters, and her grandsons. She’d avoided the visit for five decades, thinking it would be “too painful,” that she’d be reminded of the war or, worse, of how all her close family members had either passed on or been scattered around the world without her ever seeing them again. “Tears were running down my face,” she says, when she visited her old apartment in a beautiful Art Deco building fallen to ruin. The Catholic church she’d attended was just a façade; the nave had been gutted and turned into offices for the Communist Party. Still, she loved the life and spirit of the new Shanghai and returned home to Long Island inspired enough to paint a guest room in the theme of what she’d seen and to redo one of her gardens in the Chinese style, complete with manicured dwarf maples and custom-made moon doors. And the pain, well, it didn’t feel like pain, exactly. “In Portuguese you call it ­saudade,” she says. “It means a kind of longing and a love that still remains, that every once in a while when you think about it, it is with nice memories. It’s a missing. The other word in Portuguese that is similar is lembranças. Memories. They’re both beautiful words.”

“I didn’t think of myself as good-looking at all: China Machado’s many beginnings,” by Jada Yuan, New York Magazine, Aug 14, 2011

gran via, 2004

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George, Madrid 2004

Walking on a Friday night with John the Nigerian and George from Sierra Leone.  Jaunty, bouncing down the bright slope lit in the glare of numerous headlights.  There are no shadows.  It seems Madrid is a city without shadows, whether violently over-exposed in the long sharp daylight or blanketed in electric night, even the darkeness is bright, composed of overlapping rays of light.

What is normally intimate, is here public.  Nigerian, Camerounian, Benin ladies line the “great way” calling to potential clients, in several languages offering blowjobs.  John is steely, silent as we pass each small group, but George is perenially jocular, waving as a few of the ladies call him by name: My brodda, I no see you long time, wey you dey? 

Nevertheless, our steps do not slow.  We are on a mission, searching for the Chinese street vendor who the night before sold John a packet of “marlboros” hastily rolled by unskilled hands.  John clutches the cigarettes angrily, disgusted with their flat bent forms. For 3€ he is sure he deserves more.

The vendor stares at John, unrecognizing, deaf to complaints made in halting, urgent Spanish.  When John leans dangerously close to his face, the vendor jumps, displaying an agility his earlier stoicism belied. The argument ensues, circular, incomprehensible to all but the most knowledgeable onlookers.

I call out to the combatants, asking in English if I may take their photos.  John immediately strikes an indignant pose, while the vendor stares resolutely away from my camera. I snap this shot and we are off back up Gran Via, the way we came.

John, Madrid, 2004

neighbors

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Jana Leo, My Neighbor, 2002 – 2011

Artist’s statement:

She used to live across the hallway and was the first person I related to when I moved to Chinatown in 2002. She came into my apartment when assembling furniture She pushed the door, smile and look around talking in Chinese and sit in a chair while I was cleaning; for years she knock at my door and gave me “food stamps canned food”: salmon, green beans, carrots and evaporated milk. I used to storage the goods in a closet, took pictures of the labels, and open a can once in while,  when I was too busy to get any other food. She lived by herself and spend most her day in and out from the apartment to the park in front of the building. Years passed like that; she smiled when sees me happy and recognized it was because of the person I have around, who took this picture.In 2008, I expend the whole winter in Spain and when I come back I realized she wasn’t going to the park anymore and that she have caretakers all day long. I asked what happened, (she spoke to me in Chinese and I in Spanish) I realized by the amount of pills and diapers that something serious have happened. She walked along the hallways during the day but never go anymore to the park. I start walking holding her in the hallway. I looked at her feet wearing just sleepers. She looked so frail to me. I imagine carrying her in my back but then asked myself what if she falls. I called social services to find out about the care takers and if they can take her down through complains so I wouldn’t have to do it. A few times, I tried to make her going down the stairs; but she would stop right before the first step. We spent the summer walking in the hallway.

I have a ticket to go back to Spain with no return for a long while. I signed myself a date for crossing the limit; the limit between the hallway and the staircase; the limit between her apartment and the door; the limits between the building door and the park with a street in the middle. I practiced the walk mentally. A Saturday in late August 2009, I knocked at her door and take it to the hallway walk, one step down, she hesitated, I hold her tight, letting her know we were going to make it. She stopped. I indicated that we were going to make it, I don’t know how but was clear to her. I hold her very tied, and her weigh went to the first step and then the other and the other, her fragile body, the feet on sleepers… I put one of her hand on the stair rail and hold her body, one and two and three and four and five and six, and seven…. And one and two and three and four and five and six, and seven and one and two and three and four and five and six, and seven eight we were by the door. She stopped again as if she didn’t want to open the door to life anymore. I opened the door and blocked the way back with my body. She stepped out. She laughed at the sun. Her face illuminated and she talked to me. We crossed the street and find a bench in the park and sit. She was in her park. She was alive. I tried to create a pattern for her so she has to ask the caretaker to do when I am not there.The amount of times I pictured in my mind the trip from her apartment into the park sound silly to say because were so many and we only did it once. We were not just going downstairs, I was crossing my own limits with her and she was defeating death.

I didn’t know her name. We never have any reason to like each other but we did.

This picture in the fire stair in between mine and her apartment to honor her and to recognize that I missed her. Also this picture in the fire stair, that has became my gallery is a piece of art. It recognizes that affinities to people are made beyond age, positions, education, language, or origin.

This picture was taken by Simon Lund a Saturday afternoon, sometime in August 2009.Jana Leo
August 5 2011
New York

evidence

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In January I went to White Columns to see, “Looking Back,” an exhibit surveying artwork shown in New York in 2010, curated by Bob Nickas. The work was a mix of mostly New York-based artists, young and old, living and dead. One piece that caught my attention was by Candy Jernigan:


Candy Jernigan, Found Dope: Part II, 1986 (detail)
Found objects on paper 28 in. x 39 in.

Broken bits of used crack vials are pasted into into grid formation on a large poster, sealed behind glass, like the butterflies of a 19th century natural historian. Beneath each artifact in the grid is small even block handwriting, marking the date, time and location of its collection, e.g. June 11/Second Avenue at Third street/west side/10 AM. At the center of the grid, towards the bottom, is a hand-drawn map of a section of Manhattan’s East Village, running from Houston Street in the south to Eighth Street in the north, and west to east from Broadway to Avenue A. A small dot on the map is marked with the words “We are here.” Is “here” the site of the piece’s original exhibition, or the home of the artist?

Seven months after seeing this piece, it stays with me as an influence in my own work. The simplicity of the idea, the dedication of the artist to the everyday routine of walking around her neighborhood, and the obsessiveness of collecting and labeling that pariah of all New York trash–used drug paraphernalia–all combine into a portrait of a neighborhood at a particular moment in its history; a moment all but unimaginable in today’s East Village, with its moneyed and policed revelers. What sorts of trash might an observant walker find on her morning walk through the same streets, two decades after Jernigan?

dumpster diving

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Alejandro Duran, Washed Up, 2010

New York based artist, Alejandro Duran, is creating art from trash that washes up on the beaches of Sian Ka’an, in Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula. Although Sian Ka’an is a federally-protected reserve, the Mexican government cannot prevent the area from becoming the final resting place for trash from all over the world. Duran collects the trash, categorizes the different pieces by color, strips them of labels, arranges his collections in the landscape, and then photographs them. The playful titles of the photographs, such as Nubes, Fruta Negra, and Mar (pictured above) belie the perverse horror of waste which will never biodegrade–carelessly discarded by people who believe what they can’t see won’t hurt them–travelling on the open seas and eventually choking the life of a nature reserve thousands of miles away.

Duran also creates “Product Portraits,” which he labels with the product’s country of origin:


Poland, Shockwaves


Switzerland, Zetafen


United States, WD-40

After photographing these items, Duran uses his own funds to cart the trash to recycling centers; however, this is an extremely difficult undertaking for one artist, working under the constraints of time, money and geography.

Washed Up is truly an exercise in “archiving the city,” if we imagine that cities all around the world create these waste-images of themselves, carried by currents to far-away places.

found archive

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Walking in the hilly maze of streets between Istiklal Cadessi and Cihangir in Istanbul in July 2009, Itai and I came across a small shop crammed full of boxes of old photographs, and assorted personal objects, like jewelry, used perfume bottles, souvenirs from trips to other places. It was as if the contents of innumerable Istanbul lives had been dumped into his shop. An old man sat outside of the shop, entirely uninterested in us as we poked around and intruded into the forgotten memories of unknown others.  I bought a few photographs from the old man for one lira.

I remembered the walk today when, as I took a book of photographs of the Istanbul bus terminal off the shelf, these photos fell out onto the floor. Picking them up, I felt the bustle and beauty of Istanbul again, its distinguished decay, its fullness and color, its melancholy elegance.

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I am not an Istanbullu, and may never be, but I love this city more than I have a right to. In the moment of seeing these black and white photographs I was seized by a longing to return, to know the people in the images, to walk in those places. Despite only visiting once, and for a short time, Istanbul entered my dreams. I search for friends in its hills at night, and always find them, in doorways and courtyards, old friends, good friends. In this way I have never left. What is this longing that infects me, prompting such dreams? Is it for particular people and places? How can these images of strangers and unknown places be as magnetic as friendship?

Orhan Pamuk warns of the dangers of exaggerating his city’s beauty:

Whenever I find myself talking of the beauty and the poetry of Istanbul’s dark streets, a voice inside me warns against exaggeration, a tendency perhaps motivated by a wish not to acknowledge the lack of beauty in my own life. If I see my city as beautiful and bewitching, then my life must be so too. A good many writers of earlier generations fell into this habit when writing about Istanbul: Even as a they extol the city’s beauty, entrancing me with their stories, I am reminded they no longer live the place they describe, preferring the modern comforts of western cities. From these predecessors I learned that the right to heap immoderate lyrical praise on Istanbul’s beauties belongs to those who no longer live there, and not without some guilt: for the writer who talks of the city’s ruins and melancholy is never unaware of the ghostly light that shines down on his life. To be caught in the beauties of the city and the Bosphorus is to be reminded of the difference between one’s own wretched life and the happy triumphs of the past.

– Istanbul: Memories and the City, p.56-57