THIS LONG CENTURY

When my grandmother died in 2018, these were among the things I took from the condo where she’d lived since the 1990s. She was a music teacher and she read a lot. She was interested in science and unexplained phenomena, including the possibility of extra-terrestrial life. She had a large collection of LPs—classical and opera music she’d been collecting since the 1950s—but I couldn’t fit them in my car (or my apartment) and they were given to a charity shop. She tried to teach me to read music and play the piano, but I never learned. The photograph is a view of the Mississippi River from the porch of the house she lived in before she moved to the condo. I spent a lot of my childhood in that house, on that porch. She always rose early. Her lack of sleep was a point of pride. The porch was where I’d find her when I got out of bed. She’d have been up for hours, drinking coffee and doing the crossword. Once, in winter, when I was a toddler, walking from her house to her car in the dark so she could drop me off with my parents on her way to the elementary school where she worked, I asked, Why do we have to get up in the middle of the night?















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Kathryn Scanlan received a 2021 American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for “exceptional accomplishment” in literature. Her story collection THE DOMINANT ANIMAL was named a Best Book of 2020 by The Guardian, Southwest Review, and Publishers Weekly, and her first book, AUG 9-FOG, was praised in a starred review by Publishers Weekly as “an outstanding debut, profound and moving: Scanlan’s portrait of an everywoman feels entirely new.” Scanlan’s most recent novel KICK THE LATCH, is out now. She lives and works in Los Angeles.

This is a list compiled when titling paintings. It’s from anything I’m reading or come across which seems title’ish around the time I have to title.

Nectar reward –
Truck exhaust
Spread illusion
Air breathing
As if cooking could
Nectar reward
The unopened act
Modulation
Water for life


the triple yoke
The twinning theme
To all men one body each
unsettles the obvious
emptiness is energetic
their clod of earth
powerful bodies giving their whole strength to the labor of holding on
disturbed equilibrium
even his failures
cease-less serpentine quiver
isolating restless
clues of up-and-down
aerial detachment
vanishing pole of attraction
stride into the present
humorless pathos
craving, contrition, defeat,
stir the heart up
into fellow feeling
fingering nerves
significance in the present
in pliant matter
large nature
that of a modeler
posthumous fortune
medium in fluctuation, a churning sea.
battered prow
symbolic of an energy more intensely material
flickering “lumps and holes”
every transient
almost automatic expressions ”2
a rubber band
dimmer light
nurture the other kind
problems with imagination and courage
obsolete expectations
humanistic rewards
pathological state
The Condition of the Humanities
Dark adult privacy’s
Expression of character
Aversion of taste
Modest estate
Desolate
Automatic expressions
Decorative centerpieces
Flickering lumps
Intensely material
Other than anatomical
Down like a putty


Battered prow
Loyalty renewed
Modeler
Wilder if hammer
Thinking in stone
Forget his stones
Delivered with pride
Hack work
Now was ten years ago
The shrinking self
Plight of its public




Dirty chubby babies
Open the lotus and see if you can find what’s inside
I’ve been blinded from too much salt
Do u justice
Psychotic eve
So don’t get anywhere
Three mothers


Wavering consensus


Fellow feeling


👌🏼Tribute a claw




Three years a pulpit


Going with what gives
Intermittent cruelty
Be less stupid
The overwhelmed space


Another femininity

Cheddar news
Intellectually vacuous
Love in the new millennium
Hidden hands
You disappear
What counts as virtue
Anything attached together
Modulation
To void
Unending demands of simple sight
Wager for life
You say it’s a river
Vertigo of meaning
Owells roses
Wendell berry new book
Or
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Marley Freeman was born in 1981, in Boston, MA, she lives and works in Massachusetts and New York. Recent solo exhibitions include those held at Parker Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2023), Karma, New York, NY (2022), Travesia Cuatro, Guadalajara, Mexico (2021), and Parker Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2020). Select group exhibitions include NEW ABSTRACTS: RECENT ACQUISITIONS, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA (2022), CERAMICS CLUB: CC22, White Columns, New York, NY (2022), A WINDOW IS ALSO A WALL, Dunes, Portland, ME (2022) and IMPRESSIONS OF THE FALL, 47 Canal, New York, NY (2022). Her work is included in the collections of Fundación AMMA, Mexico City; Fundación Medianoche0, Granada, Spain; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; RISD Museum, Providence, RI; San Antonio Museum of Art, San Antonio, TX; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY.

December 5, 1968

Last night I went coon hunting with six of the hill kid’s. They let me take Morgan along even though he didn’t know how and was consistently on the wrong trail–one of a squirrel or rabbit. But within a few hours with his blue tic pedigree, he learned and began to fit in. Of course, I too was a novice and was astonished at how each boy knew his own dog’s bark and could tell if it was on a cold or hot trail.

A certain bark would get us all running in the dark with flashlight beams darting about helping us see our way, going full speed towards the dogs, with branches hitting us in the face. And then there it was, a coon high up in a tree with the dogs circling the trunk, jumping and yelping. There was only one gun, a .22 rifle. One of the boys, whose turn it was, aimed and fired. The dogs kept barking as the coon fell to earth. Each of us held our own dog, while the shooter’s dog finished the job dropping the coon when it was dead. Then everything got quiet and the dogs went off in search of another. I left after three coons. The boys got seven that night and none of them came to school the next morning. I marked them absent from my class.
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James Benning was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA in 1942. He has been making films since 1972 and has created numerous art installations.

On July 19th the temperature in Paris was 104 degrees. The streets were eerily quiet. At 10AM on the steps outside the François Mitterrand library I saw only one single person, a shirtless man drenching himself with a bottle of water. This was my first real visit to this library and I was surprised at how challenging it was to access. I used my recently expired grad school ID to gain entry to the sub-level, where the Straub-Huillet book I was interested in reading is held. My research pass cost 5 euros and was good for the day. I had my photo taken and was given a badge. I spent my time reading Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub’s writings and slowly touring the cinema section hunched over on the bright red carpet. I took bathroom breaks and walked the long hallways. I had broken conversations with librarians. I bought a bag of potato chips and an orange juice for lunch and people watched in the lounge. I sent my friend a picture of the forest growing outside the window. By closing time I had totally forgotten about the heatwave.
























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Gillian Garcia was born in 1984, in Erie, Pennsylvania. She is a California based artist and filmmaker whose background in portrait and documentary photography informs her motion practice. She holds a BFA from New York University and an MFA in Film/Video from The California Institute of the Arts.

www.gilliangarcia.us

My maternal grandmother, Josephine Woo, née Chinn, was born in Seattle in 1919 and had incredible hands. They were delicate but strong, and had arthritic knots at the joints that made them to look like apple branches. She lived in LA since the 1940’s and collected fabrics, notions and supplies during her entire lifetime. For a time she worked as a sewer and designer at a dress shop near Hyperion in Silverlake. One day, she told me, a woman came into the shop and was interested in having clothes made to fit her doll. She was planning to market the doll as a toy and the toy would later become known as Barbie. At some point Josie enrolled in classes at Chouinard, but said she didn’t feel she was such a good artist, that she made some lampshades and then called it a day. In the mid 60’s she began making papier mache jewelry that she hand painted and sold at department stores in LA like Bullock’s. When I look at the old clippings that feature her works illustrated, I can’t help but notice that her name and her brand, ‘By Josie’, weren’t credited, and I think about the rarity of an Asian American woman being in her position during that time. She told me that one time, many years later, she spotted a bracelet of hers in a thrift shop and I could tell by her elation in recounting the story that it was more meaningful to have found her work circulating in this way, more so than being in the department stores. She had an unconventional sense of value that I honor.

























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Ava Woo Kaufman was born in 1986, in San Francisco, she lives and works in Point Reyes, California. She graduated from UCLA Art in 2008 and co-founded the company Buena Vista in 2012. She works in textiles, photography, printmaking, and painting. In 2022, South Willard mounted an exhibition of her work.

www.avawookaufman.com