Wear + Here

November 5, 2015

A Gateway

The Agate House in Petrified Forest National Park in northeastern Arizona paired with Vivienne Westwood Red Label’s Knit Stripe Top.

A Spanish explorer, standing on the edge of the vast badlands of northeastern Arizona, saw a landscape painted with the colors of the sunset (hence its enduring name The Painted Desert). But even a surrealist wouldn’t imagine this trippy expanse– striped and bumped and sprinkled with petrified logs some 200 million years old.

Of the stories subsumed in the stratified layers, some surface: like the Agate House, built by ancestral Puebloan people sometime between 1050 and 1300. The scarcity of artifacts suggests a brief occupancy belying an original plan: the size and scale of the ambitious construction – eight rooms made of medium- to large-petrified logs transported to the top of a knoll – means the Agate House was most likely conceived as a single-family, year-round dwelling amid a neighborhood of such structures (long disappeared). So why abandoned so quickly?

The silhouette of the Agate House can be seen long before you arrive by way of a paved trail cutting through the Petrified Forest National Park. Like a lighthouse or beacon, beckoning, warning. Eerie in its abandoned beauty, the house is a jewel of memory amid geologic chaos now calm, painted.

October 20, 2015

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Blooms buried

Flower House in Detroit (Photo by Heather Saunders) paired with Versus Floral Print Playsuit.

A year ago, florist Lisa Waud bought an abandoned duplex in Detroit for $250. Condemned and crumbling, the house bucked redemption: shingles peeling like scabs, bottle shards tiling the floor, leaks striping the walls, trash towering knee-high, a dead dog buried in the rubble. And yet, Waud had a vision of the house as a venue for vanguard floral installation: Inviting florists from Michigan, Ohio, New York and Canada, Waud and her talented team transformed the Hamtramck property (aided by 36,000 blooms) into Flower House for one weekend only (last weekend). Part art installation, part urban memorial, part tribute to American growers, the Flower House will soon be razed: flora composted, building materials repurposed, and land replanted as a seasonal farm for Waud’s flower business, Pot & Box. An ephemeral enchanted garden (perfect for playsuit romping).

October 10, 2015

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Hardly Hirstrionics

Damien Hirst’s Newport Street Gallery in Vauxhall, London (Photo by Yuki Shima/Dezeen) paired with Maison Margiela Waxed Leather Sandal.

On a quiet block in south London, a legacy of industrious creativity stretches back to the Victorian era. A theater scenographer worked here, painting theatre sets. As did a flower wheelbarrow maker. And most recently, artist Damien Hirst. But as of Thursday, Hirst has reopened the row of studios as a public exhibition space of his vast art collection of some 3,000 artworks by the likes of Francis Bacon, Pablo Picasso and Tracey Emin. “I’ve felt guilty owning work that is stored away in boxes where no one can see it,” he said (in the New York Times’ T Magazine) of the £25 million transformation of the space by London-based architecture firm Caruso St John (the design genius behind the Tate Britain). The stairwells epitomize the firm’s virtuosity.

Free to visit, Newport Street Gallery presents Hirst’s collection in solo and group shows spanning six spacious galleries with cathedral ceilings. Beyond contemporary masterworks, the gallery displays quirky aspects of Hirst’s collection including a taxidermy tableau of kittens having tea. Nary a formaldehyde shark in sight.

September 26, 2015

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Transcendent

Thursday night at the Trans-Pecos Festival of Music and Love at El Cosmico in Marfa, TX (Photo: Brooke) paired with Raquel Allegra Bi-Color Alpaca Poncho.

A scene from Thursday night at the Trans-Pecos Music Festival in Marfa, TX (yes, back), the peaking moon foreshadowing the moonlighting to come of Annie Clark, aka St. Vincent, as backup for Jenny Lewis (paired with the “uniform” of Trans-Pecos, as we were told, a poncho). Also uniform: Elation at the casual cameos and bright talent lured by the high desert.

September 10, 2015

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Textural possibility

Part of Stephen Powers’ “Love Letter to Baltimore,” a series of large-scale murals in Baltimore, MD paired with Stella Jean Queens Trouser.

Steve Powers considers himself a “visual blues artist, a painting troubadour playing his trade worldwide.” Here in Baltimore, MD, most recently in NYC. He began his career in graffiti, working under the tag ESPO, and soon translated his urban epigraphs into large-scale commissions like “Love Letter to Baltimore,” supported by the thriving Baltimore Mural Program (he’s penned other love letters to other cities spanning the country). This possibility-rich epiphany emblazons the Fitch Company Building on Russell Street. “Forever Together” clad the fronts of 36 houses slated for demolition in East Baltimore. As part of his B’more amore, Powers set up an ICY Signs outpost, offering to create free signs for locals businesses. I see insight. And a chance to fete John!

September 1, 2015

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Water under

Olafur Eliasson’s Cirkelbroen Bridge in Copenhagen paired with Club Monaco Lisette Dress.

More than 7,000 people attended the Aug. 22 opening of Olafur Eliasson’s Cirkelbroen Bridge last week in Copenhagen, an instant tribute to the stunning work of civic art. Crossing a canal in the Christianshavn neighborhood, the design channels Eliasson’s childhood memories of hop-skipping between boats strung along Icelandic harbors. Five circular platforms orbiting around staggered masts create a jagged route for commuters to cross and pedestrians to ponder, as some 5,000 people are expected to do daily – a meeting place, a vantage point, a conduit and a communion.

In his art, Eliasson harnesses transient natural materials – wind, fog, flowing water – into monumental installations, as he did so deftly in The New York City Waterfalls in 2008. Cirkelbroen finds him applying this approach to urban ephemerality, the “atmosphere of a space,” as he describes in an Arch Daily interview. “Obviously, one cannot plan atmosphere, as it is co-produced by the people who use the space, but it is possible to nurture an atmosphere, to allow it to grow,” he said. “As an artist, I work with abstract and emotional qualities, so this is where, I believe, art can play a role. I’m convinced that politicians, urban planners, and developers need to expand their toolbox by bringing in what I would call creative reality producers – artists, social scientists, sociologists, anthropologists, historians, dancers, poets, environmental activists, and philosophers – to rethink urban spaces.”

Stability amid transience, creative reality amid urban planning: both comforting thoughts in a time of change.

August 30, 2015

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Beautiful mind

Cleveland Clinic Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health, designed by Frank Gehry, in Las Vegas paired with Roksanda Pembroke Dress.

An undulating façade as colorfully complicated as the mind itself. A surprise to find such inspiration amid the noise and neon. The Frank Gehry-designed Cleveland Clinic Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health in downtown Las Vegas supports patients with memory and movement disorders and their families – an integrated approach reflected in the integrated architecture and business model. The center works to preserve memories (through vanguard research) and create new ones (through event rentals) – all supported by a corresponding nonprofit, Keep Memory Alive.

In 1921, four physicians created the Cleveland Clinic under the vision that compassion, cooperation and innovation could foster excellence in patient care, education and research. By design, the Lou Ruvo Center manifests that mission. “I’m trying to make a building that people will want to visit, remember, talk about, and enjoy,” Frank Gehry said. One detail speaks to the individual experience of cognitive disorders: no two of the 199 windows are alike.

August 27, 2015

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Stars align

The Neon Museum in Las Vegas, NV paired with Vivienne Westwood Anglomania Lottie Denim Shirt Dress.

Back in January, AFAR Magazine published a piece, “Where to Travel This Year, According to Your Astrological Sign.” Apparently, my Aquarian modus operandi is eccentricity and change, and my itinerary should be anything weird: “Aquarians love things that are more unique and uncommon than anything else—something that’s off the wall and unconventional,” writes AFAR Editor Danielle Walsh. “You’re here to become more of who you know you really are over time. But that’s good! It’s that peculiarity that helps drive culture and tickles the periphery of social growth and change by doing things differently.”

Among the picks of places for an Aquarian to visit in 2015: The Neon Museum in Las Vegas. So that’s what I’m doing. Today.

August 26, 2015

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Angel’s wings

Richard Meier’s Jubilee Church in Rome, Italy (Photo by Roland Halbe) paired with Cos Draped Skirt.

Searching for solace in the concrete sails of Richard Meier’s Jubilee Church in Rome – a Modernist moment for the Vatican, completed in 2003, a beautiful statement for a parish church in an outer borough (that I tried to hoof it too in June). Commissioned to commemorate the 2,000th anniversary of Christianity, the church stands as a powerful symbol of renewal, transcending its setting to offer much needed comfort amid the grief felt in my small community.

At 2003 news conference before the consecration ceremony, Meier described the concept behind the church, his first: “When I think of a place of worship, I think of a place where one can sit and be reminded of all the things that are important outside our individual lives.”

He continued: “The central ideas for creating a sacred space have to do with truth and authenticity, a search for clarity, peace, transparency, a yearning for tranquility, a place to evoke otherworldliness in a way that is uplifting.”

Clarity. Peace. Please.

August 7, 2015

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Effects loop

Stellar” by Baptiste Debombourg in Nantes, France paired with MSGM Pleated Dress.

Summer in rural America, a wish-you-were-here postcard framing a county fair. My recent foray reintroduced rollercoasters into my life. And now this, a same-same-but-different scene of gravity (and culture) defiance from France: “Stellar,” a public art piece by Baptiste Debombourg in Nantes. The sculpture, part of the citywide Le Voyage à Nantes festival, will remain on view in the central Place du Bouffay through August 20.

Dually inspired by the outdoor cafes ringing the Place du Bouffay and Robert Delaunay’s artwork for the 1937 Paris World’s Fair, Debombourg has laced 1,200 café chairs into an elaborate coaster of two ellipses that rise up, meet and separate (a dance echoed in the folds of this MSGM dress). Channeling the sociability of the outdoor patio, he approached each chair as a person, looping rebelliously in aerial play, woven into place yet gracefully defiant of its laws. Such is summer.