Drive: January 17, 2021 - Part 2

Chapter 2: Discovering Hollywood Dell and the Castle on the Hill

East of Fairfax. Stopped at a light. It got busier as I approached Fairfax and stayed that way after I crossed. Alarmingly so. Sure, I had a mask and most were wearing it, but I decided to pull off Melrose and get up to Sunset.

After stopping to take in Santa’s workshop, on an otherwise “normal” side street, I turned right onto Santa Monica and drove through WeHo, before eventually turning onto Highland.

I can’t say I know much about the church other than that it’s Methodist, and its auditorium is the auditorium they used in ‘Back to the Future,’ but I’ve always loved the way it’s positioned as you drive up Highland.

I passed the church and upon looking for the theater, took a wrong turn and happened upon an entrance to the Hollywood Dell.

I looped around and finally made it to the Ford only to discover that the infamous cross above the theater was inaccessible and not quite photogenic from my vantage point, before ultimately going back to drive through the Dell.

I meandered down, taking a sharp right into the Dell. As I drove down the street, I noticed houses were not only lined on either side of the street, but flanked up on the hillsides as well, peering between the alleys of the houses on the street. It was certainly not a high traffic street, at least at that current time, but it was not without life: people on walks, a few folks congregated in driveways, and leftover tinsel from festivities past. To the left I caught a glimpse of a castle on the hill, before ultimately being spit out back into the hustle and bustle of the city, marked by the tunnel under the freeway overpass. Of course, I had more to explore.

Returning from whence I came, again, I came upon the location of the medieval-style castle on the hill, propped above the street by a fortress-like garage. I found myself going up the hill to see what the front? residential? entrance of the castle looked like. I carried on straight to a cul-de-sac while the road kept winding on up the hill. At the end of the road, I found myself much more interested in the Spanish-style abode tucked into the mountain, than the uninspired entrance to the otherwise castle-inspired facade. After repositioning within the cul-de-sac, I continued on the winding road, stopping for some breathtaking buildings.

Up top, I found myself in a familiar location, from a vantage point, I had never experienced. From there I descended.

After leaving the Dell, and avoiding the freeway entrances, I turned right and headed up the road outside the perimeter of my newly discovered enclave and it’s reminders of the world beyond it’s boundaries. I stopped to get a good shot of Nipsey, before turning around again, so I could get a picture of a message on a cement pedestal. I would continue East and see what I would’ve encountered had I turned left when I exited the Dell.

To Be Continued…

Drive: January 17, 2021 - Part 1

Chapter 1: Melrose

Made my way up La Cienega, with the intention to get to the cross on the mountain by the Ford’s Theater. No particular route in mind, I’d been up Highland ave. recently, and figured I’d go up La Cienega to maximize how much I see once I started heading east.

Turned on Melrose. Why not? It’s been a minute since I’ve been down Melrose, and I know they’ve got great graffiti art.

I was surprised to see how empty it was.

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My first find of the day.

Not clearly visible from the photo, the signature of the artist eponymously named, Alec.

I was intrigued by the sign on the building next door. Was it as grassroots as it seemed or was it a design choice? This was * off * Melrose btw.

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Looking back at the virtually empty street to check the intervals between groups of passing cars. How bizarre.

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On the next block up, I discovered this mural. On the wall behind me was a peaceful yarn bomb installation. I had to circle around the block to get a better vantage point of it all. So I turned into the lot behind the “old”? Fred Segal store. I thought I went to a closing sale their with friends of a former moment?

As I wrapped back around towards that intriguing building, I saw these murals. Looked legit. Just hoping its not performative.

Circling back around, I was able to find a parking spot to get the picture of the mural across the street and the yarn bombing to my right.

Catty-corner to the yarn art, was a lot of graffiti, plaster, and stencil work over what had clearly been an commercial mural. So I loaded back up, went back through the alley once more and then back in front of Marilyn and onto Melrose so I could safely turn left over the deserted Melrose Ave., and onto the street to better examine the stencil work.

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I drove a block past and double backed, approaching melrose with the street art on the corner up on my left. As I pulled up, on the right side of the street, is an AT&T building. I saw the familiar work of a street artist I’d encountered in a past walk when I lived in Pico Robertson. By the post office on Pico.

I documented this one for the collection, turned around and crossed the street to investigate the graffiti that had allured me in the first place, before heading on with my journey.

To be continued…

(Re)-Creating Auras

Our process is an attempt to (re)-create the aura of a time and place.

Garrett Durbin writes to remove the burden of "poetry" from his poetry. Meaning that, more than the great tradition of poetry or some formal/analytical approach, some beautiful /perfectly formed end product, he wants the process to be firmly embedded in the poetry itself. The beauty and the ugliness, OR NEITHER, of the mind; the mundane, the thought processes that are poetic even if we don't define them that way.

Andrew Mandinach captures small moments from every day life in order to give power to the moments in life. It's about the moments themselves. The work is an attempt to reach poetic/appreciative state for what we gain from specific time and places. There's no barrier for entry because the work is about encapsulating those moments that make the corner of your lips raise, for even the slightest moment.

Collectively, the more clearly we can get readers to think about our own vivid thoughts, their own process of thinking or writing or creating, and how that feels, the better. We don't attempt to articulate a description of what we have to say about the state of the world. We try to be it.

Freeze Out

 

I keep hearing cars that don’t exist;
I try not to feel like a protagonist but I do.

Parents Everywhere Are Going Crazy
Kid Gets Yelled At, Lives
Dancing Teen Sees Boy, Becomes Slightly More Subdued Across the Room

The light of my own dream
Is a fucking moth thing.

 
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“Words by Garret Durbin, Photos by Andrew Mandinach”

And We Were Gone

Dying breeds soaking —

That was us. We had two hours.

I knew I was finite. We were succeeding.

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I wanted to tell you so much;

“I’m melting this morning

Like a statue that really cries. This way!”

I remember thinking you

Were the kind of person who made me think

“I don’t even have Ireland guts, really,

I want to know more about how you see

A building cutting the sky and I don’t have

That nagging curiosity about living on a farm,

Not here, not in New York.” I turned to

Tell you that but saw a rat. Literally book perfect.

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So when I say

Nothing when I notice

You have stopped for a picture

I am saying I love you.

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We stumbled into revolution. I couldn’t stop my hands

Or anchor my jaw. If my dog

Had the kind of thoughts I was having

He would bare his teeth. You nodded.

And by myself I’m sure-handed — good with matches —

But trying to light a fire alone can get to a point

That feels like lottery chances. And I do get lucky. I shouldn’t

Be so harsh. It’s just that when I took what you said about solitude

Into my next twenty-three solitudes I lit

About fifteen fires. You have no idea how good that is.

Your gift to me is momentum

I’ve kept forever.

So when I say

“I’m so proud — I am so proud

To be this warm,” to myself,

I am saying I love you.

“Words by Garret Durbin, images by Andrew Mandinach”

The Details of Portraiture

In April of 2016, I went to go see Catherine Opie: 700 Nimes Road, at MOCA’s Pacific Design Center location. Catherine’s photos presented a portrait of Elizabeth Taylor, through her home and the objects that filled it. A mix of broad views of the Bel Air home and detailed shots of jewelry and keepsakes adorning her dressers. Considering that just a week later I was to start documenting homeLA // Victoria Park, the show was encouraging to say the least. The show has since come and gone* and I’ve been thinking about putting my inspiration into words for sometime, but it wasn’t until some recent events occurred in my life that helped me understand Opie’s work - and mine - in a new light.

Opie

Opie

Earlier this year, I lost my grandfather. One of the first things I found myself doing in the aftermath of the news was documenting his house. The way it was when he left it. The first chance I got, before the rest of the family arrived. The furniture, the knick knacks, the stains, the folds - the home. While this isn’t the strangest response, given my background, it quickly became part of my process of grieving.

Over the past four years I’ve documented every aspect of homeLA: artists developing work in new spaces, capturing themes and patterns as they emerge, and doing so from every angle and corner of every home. I document not only the artists as they explore the houses we’re invited into, but also the personal details that make the houses, homes. I work to capture the living breathing spaces that are given life by the people who inhabit them. So when it came time to say good bye to my grandfather, I felt compelled - and quite comfortable - to capture who my grandfather was, and how he lived at the end of his life, through the documentation of the things that filled his home - particularly because he took pride in his belongings.

When I walked into the Pacific Design Center, I got to know Catherine Opie's work on a much deeper level than I had before. I was familiar with her work, but only through my studies and the occasional run-in with a work or two. I had never seen an entire exhibition dedicated to her. That exhibition gave me a deeper understanding of the work I do documenting dance in domestic spaces, but it wasn’t until I found myself photographing my grandfather’s house that it really sank in. There was one photograph in particular (and even an exhibition note) that really had an impact. The photo was of Taylor’s kitchen table, with the table as subject, and in the background through the mirrored glass walls, you could see Opie. She’s unassuming - you could look at the picture and not notice her - but she’s there. This was a powerful moment for me.

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During homeLA, I do my own dance of sorts: trying to get the best documentation without getting in the way of the dancers, or audience when they enter. Over time, I developed an unspoken guideline to remove myself from the images. It’s not about me, it’s about the artists moving throughout the space. This unconscious self-imposed constraint even manifested itself in the rehearsal space - where I have the freedom to move around as I like and not worry about audience. Until this exhibition, homeLA, for me, was about the home, artists, and hosts, but seeing Catherine in that photo added photographer to the list. Her inclusion in (a few of) the images throughout the show didn’t ever position her as the subject, but rather was a natural inclusion of her body in the space as a part of the process. In our “conversation” she let me know it was ok. Being in the photo doesn’t take anything away from the photos, but rather encompasses the full experience - and in my case with homeLA - which includes the roaming photographer.

All these considerations came back to me after I started documenting the layout and objects in my grandfather’s home (did I mention that Taylor died during Opie’s process of photographing the home?). As the rest of the family entered, I became very cognizant of bodies - mine, theirs, and the lack of my grandfather’s - in the domestic setting we found ourselves in the days before the funeral. How were people using the space? What was being moved? Had I captured it? Should I re-photograph as the lighting changed? I found myself stepping back and watching as people moved through the home. Even though I had already had my time to document the framework of the house without people in it I continued documenting the little nooks and crannies. Capturing the changing light on different objects. How had my grandfather experienced things in the day vs. at night? I found myself jumping up to photograph something when I remembered a specific memory. In one instance a shadow leaned into frame. I paused. My conversation with Catherine came back to me. I realized that keeping it in the picture allowed me to be part of the process. Allowing myself to be in those pictures shifted the process from cataloguing to documenting, allowing me to say goodbye and shape my final memories in the space. I put my experience in conversation with my grandfather’s, in a way that Opie has had me thinking of since I saw her photos. 

The photos of my grandfather’s house created a sense of release through their encapsulation. If we couldn’t keep objects, I could keep photos. This was the end. Of an era, as they say. But it actually felt that way. My grandpa is the last family member of his generation to go. The golden boy of 1928. It was not only the end of a life, but also a shift in family elders. As we cleaned his house I couldn’t help but think of the objects that had come from a distant past and lived long storied lives, one that will not be continuing on in our family. To say goodbye to my grandfather’s dresser was also saying goodbye to my grandmother again. While we said goodbye to her years ago, we would not be keeping the his and hers dressers like grandpa had previously done. Our objects speak to who we are; our tastes and styles at specific times and places. If we lose that we move on with a little less clarity. Documenting things was not just about the objects but of a past time and place we could no longer hold onto. So I documented, as best I could.

Grandpa

Grandpa

While I could shrug off the fact that these feelings towards my grandfather’s home and his personal affects were sensitive due to the personal nature of the space, I’ve had this affinity for capturing personal effects within homeLA for awhile. I don’t just document dancers moving in domestic space, I also capture the details of the home - often times without artists interacting with them. 
Yet I often question the need / reason for capturing these types of images. Why do these details matter? What purpose do they have amongst the images of artists developing their work? Additionally, I don’t post a lot of the detail images to homeLA’s social media channels. And then I’m reminded that it all comes down to the process of storytelling. Those detail images have to do with how I tell stories of past shows. They create a sense of identity for/from each home that allows me to establish a sense of what the home was like and who lived there when I share it with the larger audience at a later date. As such, it’s not documenting for the sake of archiving, it’s documenting for the sake of revisiting, and communicating, and this was true as I photographed my grandfather’s home. Motivated by the desire to give myself the ability to tell this part of family story in the future I sought to capture who my grandfather was at the time of his death, and who I was at the time I took the photos.

So I’ve come to realize that my experience with homeLA is unique in that I get to be both the documentarian and the storyteller of the project, which allows me to not only see (and communicate) the growth of the project but of my own style and approach to each home. I’ve seen my work become more focused on the personal and less on the architectural. I know the moment it shifted too. A picture of his and her shoes lined up in the walk-in closet of homeLA // San Marino in 2015. It was the first home that the desire to capture the specific elements of the two story home outweighed the layout of the house. The lyre-playing mythical figure on the piano. The cat hair figurine in the living room, the tile work in the kitchen. The shoes in the closet. I had moved from architecture to accumulation within architecture, which I’d say allows me to capture a more specific glimpse of the time and place of each iteration - examining life beyond any sort of picket fence presentation strangers see from outside. 

And when you get to that level of detail, it’s not just the knick knacks, but rather the condition they’re in, the way they’re arranged. As Catherine and I explore, the areas that get more attention than others tell a story. It was a sad moment when I realized the house wasn’t the way he left it on the last day he was there. The cleaning lady had come. But she’s part of his lifestyle. She kept him in order. She knew not to touch the comb or eye drops on the dresser. A detail I later discovered. I wasn’t surprised by it, but I wasn’t expecting it. That’s what excites me about homeLA - there are all these discoveries that need to be made, that I get to uncover, asking what happens behind closed doors when we’re not entertaining and fall into our routines?

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homeLA

It’s at that level - the accumulation of details - that you are able to create a clearer portrait of a person. For Catherine, during homeLA, and in my grandfather’s home  the essence of a time and place created a portrait of a person through the details of their home, and in each situation the ability to do so was shaped by a transitionary moment. For Opie the moment occurred when Elizabeth Taylor passed away during the process, which Catherine said impacted the feeling captured in the subsequent photos. For each homeLA, I’m aware that we’ve only got a finite rehearsal period, and an even smaller window to capture the final works during the performance, which ultimately shifts with the addition of guests into the space. And in my grandfather’s home, I knew I wanted to capture the home as he had it, immediately before family entered, but also capture as much of the time period in that space as we got rid of things. Not necessarily capturing the grieving process but the time and place in our lives as we sorted through the home and its belongings. 

Our objects are significant because at some time and place they’re of interest to us. And the way we keep them, re-arrange them, speaks to where we are in our lives at that given time and place. For Catherine’s process, it was not just a time and place in Elizabeth Taylor’s life, but what became the final time and place, in which we learned what she cared about and how she maintained things in the end. A year later, I found myself documenting the final phase of my grandfather’s home and came to allow myself to be part of the process in a way I didn’t anticipate - thanks to considerations I experienced from seeing Opie’s work.

Opie

Opie

We’re done cleaning out my grandfather’s home and I documented the entire process. It didn’t make it any easier - and a few times it was hard to stop and snap - but it’s how I worked through it, and in the process discovered new ways of understanding my work. Something I’d been thinking about for over a year. 700 Nimes Road was really powerful for me in that it demonstrated that what I had been doing for years was part of a larger vocabulary. That my interest in photographing images of personal details is a form of portraiture, but that looking that closely is a process and one that I should recognize my role with in that process. Catherine and her work helped me feel comfortable within my own process.

Thank you Catherine. 

- Drew

 

This was originally published on homeLA's Process Record / September 2, 2017

Can You (Still) Hear Me Worrying In The Bathroom

So I'm not quite sure where to start, so I figure I'll jump right into it.

I have stomach issues. I say issues because I'm not quite sure what to call it. When I was younger we used to call it stomach-nerves. After a traumatic incident my senior year of undergrad, it was diagnosed as partial IBS. It has since been diagnosed as full IBS. I still call it my stomach issue because IBS isn't just about what you eat (although that's a big part of it), it also includes those "nerves" - that my dad penned early on - caused by anxiety and stress. I'm a worrier. I always have been.

I spend a lot of time in the bathroom. Not just my bathroom. Or the bathroom at work. But the bathrooms I've been forced to consider that I wouldn't have otherwise ever known about. The Target bathroom in Westminster, off the 405S. The 2nd floor bathroom in the Art of the America's building at LACMA. The bathroom of the Ralphs on Ventura in North Hollywood. Regardless of what they're like, I'm forced to experience them. Sitting. Thinking. Worrying. Am I taking too long? How long is the line outside the door? When will the banging start, urging me to get out? What interesting tile work. I hope that's just water on the floor. What's happening on Twitter? I guess I could post a picture for homeLA now. Etc.

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As far as making work for/in/about my experience in bathrooms, it just sort of just happened. Of course the idea came to me while sitting in a bathroom. I thought about starting an Instagram account, as an archive of public restrooms, of places I'd had these intense intimate moments, and if it grew, I could connect to a community of folks experiencing the same thing as me, suffering in silence. I thought about making it funny, or sharing facts. I considered taking pictures from the toilet, keeled over in pain. Of the toilet? Maybe I'd caption the ambiance of the bathroom. Maybe I'd talk about the index of pain I'd felt in each space. Then homeLA // Angelino Heights. I had already done a piece in a bathroom during homeLA // San Marino, but it didn't have anything to do with my stomach. I liked the idea of doing another bathroom piece, but trying to visually represent my experience didn't seem like the right approach - not yet anyway - and I thought it'd be interesting to represent my experience through what goes on in my head. Let someone else hear it and experience space the way I do.

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Having done that piece and now continuing the series for homeLA // Rose Hill, I have to say, it's a nice way to work through this issue of mine. It's such a big part of my life, but I don't like to talk about it. Even with most friends. It still feels embarrassing to do so. This process of creating has been very liberating, to literally give voice to an experience that's been so isolating. It's scary to have something hit you out of the blue and despite the time or location, you're forced to race the clock to try and find the nearest bathroom. Even when you get to the bathroom there are so many questions; the consideration of space as you sit and stare. The thought of the world beyond the door you've barricaded yourself behind. My work is about giving myself the freedom to talk about my issue, enlighten others of an experience most likely different from theirs, and in doing so open up new ways of thinking about bodies within any space.

Originally published for homeLA's 'Process Record' / September 7, 2016