Salton Sea
February 2019
Salton Sea, February 2019
In the late winter of 2019 I traveled to Bombay Beach, CA for the second time in my life to spend a week with a group of three fellow female artists.
The first night I recorded: Day one Bombay Beach. The moon is nearly full, the sea salty I trust; we arrived after dusk. We got tangled in a double rainbow along the way, between two palm trees and a long deep ditch bands of crimson and violet plunged into dry land. Alexia is currently at the table strumming air on theremin. The decor of our home is solidly located in another century. This is like the strangest dream.
In the days that followed I experienced cold nights, sun and rain-spattered days. I get off on these kinds of places. Old soul places. If you’ve never been to the Salton Sea and are down for adventure, I recommend it—as well as our Airbnb. The host and owner of the place is a German documentary filmmaker who has been making art and films about notable bodies of water for the past few years. The house he bought and converted to an airbnb—located a stone’s throw from the water—is furnished with its original ‘70s chairs and tables, tattered wallpaper, paintings of questionable quality but excellent provenance (having been made by the original owner himself). It has a fantastic fireplace.
Bombay Beach is just an hour’s drive from Palm Springs and Joshua Tree National Park, but settling down in the heart of the Sea is to settle amongst a certain kind of dereliction and dust, to relish the omnipotence of nature and the impermanence of manmade structures and lust. It offers an exercise in taking one’s time with some of the iconic things, the detritus, that cling around the edges of the Sea. Like all those frail skeletons of desiccated fish scattered across the beach. The assortment of box mattresses randomly plopped on the sand, their frayed remaining threads waving like flagella in the breeze.
While there I wheat pasted a bunch around the town ruins. It was my first time messing with the medium. The tool of street artists, wheat pasting is technically illegal, but in such a lawless setting it felt just fine. I created a few pieces in advance and pasted them up (text in footnotes).
Another I pasted up was a drawing that read: THE SEA WILL TELL YOU THINGS. I put it up in a ramshackle shack—a place with the remains of a kitchenette and a WC that served who knows what purpose—which arses—over the years. I put the drawing up inside, visible through a window. Though I was careful not to cover up previous artworks or tags (of merit), I did cover up a big red spray paint tag that read, rather dismally, “abandon all hope.”
Both the larger wheat paste pieces and the smaller ones have inspired more work to come already. I’m currently working on a version of THE SEA WILL TELL YOU THINGS for my gallery show in New York (opening in June at Winston Wächter). And one of the larger text pieces, which I placed on a busted slab of foundation on the beach—pasted nearly blindly in the dark on my last night there—has inspired a similar but permanent piece that I’m planning for Seattle.
The first morning back in Seattle I wrote: That feeling when you get home from the desert and clean never felt so clean. You dress your small but precious wounds. You shake the sand out of cracks and wrinkles you never knew before. You're disoriented because, coming back through that wormhole, you left something ineffable behind. But such sacrifices are a small and happy price to pay for the chance to tread across the face of a thing so relentlessly elemental....
1.
YOU HAD ME AT
YOUR SALINE SHALLOWS
HUNDREDS BELOW SEA
LEVEL SAN ANDRES
SALTON SINK
MIRACLE VALLEY IN THE
PRISTINE DESERT SHORES
GHOST ROAD GRIDS
OFF GRID
DELICATE BIFURCATED SPINES
SPLAYED BONES OF BIRDS LIKE
SUGARED LACE
DESERT BEACH GLAZED
NORTH SHORE
BOMBAY BEACH
ALGAL BLOOMS
MUDPOTS
PUPFISH
MUD GUSHERS
NOXIOUS BLOOMS
SALT CRUSTED EVERYTHING
CHARRED DAMASK TATTERED
THE SCENT OF ROTTED EGG
XANADU PLEASURE DOOMED
SEA WORTH ITS SALT
THRONGED WITH THIRSTY
THREADFIN SHINERS CARP
MOSQUITO SAILFIN MOLLY
PHANTOM LIMB OF GOLDEN AGE PHOENIX YET UNRISING FROM THE ASHES
2.
YOU HAD ME AT
YOUR UNSETTLING DUST WHISPERED BITTERSWEET NOTHINGS
CHARRED CARVED
PUNCTURING TATTERED DAMASK THREADS WORN
THIN AND SULTRY SOILED
BY SWEET SWEAT
PUNGENT HAUNTED
WHIFF OF AMBERGRIS
AND MYRRH OPOPPANAX
THE DUST SCRAPED FROM GOLD LEAF CURLING
OFF IDOLS CRUMBLED
THE GHOSTS OF STILETTO HEELS SUNK INTO THE QUICKEST
OF SAND
