Even When Fall Is Here - Softcover

Estévez, Ruth

Softcover

ISBN 10: 173395791X ISBN 13: 9781733957915

Publisher: DoppelHouse Press, 2020

Synopsis

A conversation between an artist and a gardener in the California border-landscape about creation, change, and loss.

An intertextual, fictionalized narrative weaves together several years of Mexican artist Erick Meyenberg’s observations, research, video recordings, and paintings based on logbooks kept by gardener Chris Shea. Meyenberg’s conversations with Shea about his ephemeral landscape infer the change and loss inherent in human life and propels the deep emotional intelligence of this bilingual book as it reflects on time, creation, and the inspiration of the natural world. Shea’s remarkable, nuanced, and delicate language for color is reflected in Meyenberg’s layered appreciation for the garden Shea tended until the end of his life. Eloisa Haudenschild, Director of inSite, commissioned Meyenberg’s project with Shea for haudenschildGarage in La Jolla, California, and enlisted curator Ruth Estévez, the text’s author.

For more information about the project see the haudenschildGarage website or DoppelHouse.com. Note: This book has two parts, one in English, one in Spanish.

About this title

About the Authors

Ruth Estévez is a curator and writer based in Mexico City and Boston. She is senior curator-at-large at The Rose Art Museum in Boston and co-curator of the 34th São Paolo Biennial. She is the 2019 co-curator of Idiorhythmias, an annual program of performance, music, poetry, and text at the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA). Estévez was director and curator at the Gallery at Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater (REDCAT) in Los Angeles from 2012 to 2018 and chief curator at the Carrillo Gil Art Museum in Mexico City from 2007 to 2012. In 2010, Estévez founded LIGA-Space for Architecture, a nonprofit platform focused on experimentation in architecture, urbanism, and public art.

Erick Meyenberg (Mexico City, 1980) is a Mexico City-based artist. He holds an MFA from the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK) in Germany and a BA in Visual Arts from the National School of Fine Arts (ENAP-UNAM) in Mexico. His work has been included in solo and group exhibitions in Mexico, Germany, Austria, Spain, Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Japan and in the public collections of the Amparo Museum, Puebla, Mexico; Museum of Contemporary Art- UNAM (MUAC), Mexico City; The Benetton Foundation, Milan and Rome, Italy; and Telefónica Foundation, Mexico.

The commissioner of the project, Eloisa Haudenschild, is a collector and active supporter of global contemporary art, especially the work of emerging artists and the artistic communities in Latin America, China, and Europe. Since 1997, she has been the director of the binational initiative inSite, which commissions artists to make new work in Mexico and the United States. In 2003, she founded the haudenschildGarage, which works with artists through international and regional projects and commissions to present symposia, lectures, and film screenings to the public. A series of artist residencies introduced a group of young Chinese artists to the United States for the first time. In early 2010, the haudenschildGarage entered into partnership with Fundación Migdalia Rubio, whose mission is to offer scholarships, labs, summer programs, and holiday dinners to economically challenged elementary and high school students in Tijuana, Mexico.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Season 1

In all honesty, it was the garden that truly shaped his biography. For many, this small patch of land will disappear with time, as anecdotes always do (and perhaps it might only survive as a ruin). Public life, novel-writing, poems, and praises that accompanied him across the years ran perpendicularly to this green space. “Light green, dark green,” C would say, to define it in a few words.

It never ceases to be paradoxical to have a CV devoted to language and at the same time to avoid writing—or rather, to stop feeling responsible for the use made of it. In any case, C was committed to a life devoted to the written narrative which he was able to pause in order to dedicate himself to other sorts of physical gestures. Today, I don’t think these two things are incompatible. It is from these gestures that these stories emerge, where work and a good dose of idleness blend. In this garden, C’s essential work consisted of getting distracted, thinking of other things, fantasizing, taking his time to go to bed.

“I like gardening,” said C. “It’s a place where I find myself when I need to lose myself.”

From the outside, there was no room for misunderstanding, especially because C’s garden was a private place—if not a Secret Garden—where guests rarely entered. At the end of the side ground, he had a mount of some pretty height, leaving the wall of the enclosure breast-high, to look abroad into the fields. In fact, if one walked several hundred meters away from that retaining wall, the entire panorama would be seen with faint clarity, an exercise which, regularly practiced, revealed color systems that expanded and changed over time: the garden was a meadow consisting of sinewy beds of perennials and grasses, planted by the thousands in intermingled groupings. […] The combinations first come to life inside the house [of C], where colored pens scratch their way onto drafting paper in enigmatic hieroglyphics that read as art themselves. (Or at least that is how I interpreted them.)

Edition details

• Publisher: DoppelHouse Press
• Publication date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 173395791X
• ISBN 13: 9781733957915
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 150