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Artist CommentaryLabel
“The house in the top center is our old home on South Walnut Street in Wooster, Ohio, and the scene is about a huge street renovation project going on in front of our house all summer. They dug a deep hole (one of the pockets) in front of our house. It must have been ten feet deep and took up the whole width of the street, across our whole city lot. it collected nasty water and just sat untouched for a week or more.
There are at least two pockets in the piece. I'm sinking into the larger pocket, and my body is the kitchen sink, so I think it was a reference to feeling like we were in a sinkhole. I was clearly not having such a good time right then!
But I must have felt at least semi-playful about it, as the whole thing glows with this coral pink color, which even though it makes you think of Pepto-Bismol, is still a rather cheery color. Maybe then it seemed more garish to me. There are little girl angels in the top corners, so I suppose those are guardian angels I'm calling in to cheer us up or help turn around a slump of hard times.
My daughter Gretchen, a teenager, was playing tennis that summer and probably had raging hormones. The cat beside her is Ernesto Juarez, my husband Jimmy's sweet gray-brown Maine Coon tiger cat. And Jimmy looks like he was falling off of something. Maybe it had to do with him being unhappy at the job he had then, working as a shoe repairman, who had been hired to do custom leather orders. He had that job for another guy for almost three years before I nagged him into going back out on his own again.
The owls along the top of the piece are our patio owl lights, which we started having back then and still have now. They represent our home and also wisdom and protection, which I like to surround us with. The Polynesian guy at the bottom right corner is Tsunami, a lamp I bought at second hand shop, and which I called my muse. It really looks like that, and it shows up in my work from time to time.
I think the line of rumor mongers at the bottom is my expression of frustration to what was happening at the time with me getting a lot of publicity in the local newspapers. I just couldn't believe some of the incorrect things that got written, and I took it all to heart. Happily, later I came to the understanding that it's too hard for reporters to understand all your weird life based on a short interview. And what really counts is that your friends and family like to see your work in the paper. I was 36 or 37 when I made this piece. It was just before I moved to NYC for six months, to do an artist in residence at PS1 in Long Island City, so things changed a lot then."