Location Living: April 2012

Friday, April 13, 2012

Ashland, OR

Traveling around 6,000 miles--with over 100 hours charted in the Freestyle--we’re there. Ashland Oregon is a sister city to Asheville NC. The people are laid back, the cuisine varies and creativity is encouraged with eager smiles and head nods. We cut the trip a little short when we found the perfect house posted online. Two open bedrooms in an enormous fixer-upper on top of a hill above the city. The bedrooms are modest but the house is furnished with all the essentials we would have to buy otherwise. Dogs are allowed,washer, dryer, backyard, great local roommates and a work-in-progress sauna behind the fitness area. Deer run through the neighborhood like squirrels and drivers wave at each passing car like boat owners on a lake.

The trip itself remains incomprehensible. The sun always rises in the rear-viewand the horizon is always eleven miles away. Moving and traveling so often, it changes your mind and bodyto a new perspective. Food and sleep come and go as necessary (don’t get me wrong; we ate very well thanks to the kindness of friends and family). But the need or want for substance narrowed to water. We passed through zip codes, states, time zones and temperatures. In the desert, we would hike in heat, rest in chill and awake in snow.

The more pictures we took, the less they did any justice. It’s like trying to fit the ocean into a glass. David J.West, who had a studio in Zion, is the only photographer I met that could really capture the canyons in a single image. Most of the shots he takes are only obtainable certain times of the day. Some are only possible certain times of the year. West was one of a hundred people we met on the journey. We met servers in New Orleans, business owners in Dallas,German hitchhikers in Utah, hippies from Canada, New Zealand natives on Angels Landing and celebrities in LA. The more people you meet, the more you realize everyone is really the same. Everyone wants to discover something. Everyone wants to be remembered. Everyone wants to be original. Even writing this message, I feel originality is becoming extinct. There are so many people everywhere (all the time) that it’s difficult to believe anything can be discovered or imagined for the first time anymore.

At the National Parks, we would hike to the top of a mountain or bottom of a canyon to find a man-built restroom waiting for us. It reminds you that not only are you not the first, but the first people also hauled up supplies with them to build. After we realized the parks are more for families, we begin taking side trails and avoiding tourist locations. We found locals and asked for the best places to get away from everyone else. Then, we hiked treacherous hillsides where rocks crumbled with each step. At the end, we would climb into a cave merely to find a beer can from a past hiker or local teen. Although this seems somewhat unnerving,it’s better than a heap of tourists taking pictures of the same site from the same spot. We can’t all be first,but we can take the road less traveled. No one really remembers the other nine men who walked on the moon after Neil and Buzz, but I’m sure those men will never forget the sites they saw on the journey of a lifetime.

Sunday, April 8, 2012

The Museum of Contemporary Art, LA

This was the debut of Mystery Circle: Explosion Event for The Museum of Contemporary Art in LA. Created by Cai Guo-Qiang, Sky Ladder consisted of three enormous designs of gun powder images on cement panels. There was also an enormous crop circle replica hanging upside down along the center of the room.

Chaos In Nature, March 5, 2012. The first of the three gunpowder drawings created for exhibition. It depicts uncontrollable forces of nature--volcanoes, earthquakes, tornadoes and tsunamis.