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Fall 2022 Modernism Class Project

La Cienega (Chandelier)

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Traversing Los Angeles Through Tapestry
S La Cienega begins in one of Los Angeles’ poorest neighborhoods and spans nearly thirteen miles north until it is abruptly cut off by Sunset Blvd, one of the city's famous streets. For LA Magazine, Eric Mercado writes, “The boulevard we know as La Cienega, which in Spanish means “the swamp.” That’s because long before the street became home to Restaurant Row or the Beverly Center, it was marshland.” While the street is heavily traversed and is known locally, it is overshadowed and overlooked by the other streets of Los Angeles, which hold the attention of the general public. Despite the street’s famous “Restaurant Row” of Beverly Hills, home to many of the city's nicest restaurants, the road is largely devoid of the icons which LA is famous for. The connotation of La Cienega has been built up alongside the street, and for most of the thirteen miles, it is associated with the ‘low culture’ Los Angeles most locals want to ignore, and the rest of the world is ignorant of. Through the use of double exposure, Dee Williams’ La Cienega (Chandelier) symbolizes the class divide La Cienega is home to. The first picture is of one of La Cienega’s many ‘do-it-yourself’ style car washes alongside a few other shops, cars, and a few native trees. The second picture, which lays over the first photograph, is one of an opulent room, home to a grand chandelier and a lavishly-framed window. The second is layered over the first, creating the illusion that the viewer is looking out through the great chandelier and window onto this pedestrian street. Taken in 2011, this photograph further addresses the 2008 financial crisis, which left many of the community’s low-income families in ruin while the upper class remained untouched and thrived. On the image, Chapman University’s Escalette Collection writes, “Billboards, signs, and posters reflecting social values are shown in shop windows, on parking lots, and around freeways. The silver gelatin photographs depict expansive, visually emphatic, and occasionally empty places in downtown and the suburbs.” La Cienega (Chandelier) implicates the viewer in the moral compass of Los Angeles. She asks what it is to stand safely inside one's home when just outside businesses are rapidly closing and people in one's own community are going hungry.
Magic flowed from the garden hoses, faries filtted through cement cracks, and the street cats held a wisdom they only shared with the night. Growing up in Los Angeles what I lacked in forests and meadows and open spaces I made up for in overgrown gardens, urban hikes, visits to my dear friends at the zoo, and Saturday bike rides to the farmers market where a nutella and strawberry crepe was always waiting for me. On the drive between dads house on Riverside drive in Glendale and moms home on top of the winding hills of Silverlake, I made up fairytales about the city that played out beyond the car window. I felt as if I knew the streets around me better than anyone else, that we spoke to one another, and that they knew me just as well as I knew them.

It was on my 19th birthday when I read Play as it Lays for the second time. Blocks away from my moms old house in Silverlake celebrating my second year of "adulthood" sitting on a rooftop by the pool, basking in warmth of the springtime sun, and drinking a cocktail I'm still not quite sure how I got my hands on... Despite the friends, the celebration, and the spring emerging from a worldwide pandemic, I was busy drinking and speaking with Joan Didion, “I am what I am. To look for ‘reasons’ is beside the point" she told me while I listened oh so attentively. Finally I had found someone who knew my city as intimately as I! Joan saw the spark on the empty highway, the freedom of the secret backroads, and the lullaby that mother earth brought with her when she shook the city. Yet we also shared our grievances with Los Angeles, the people who filled it, and the men who barely filled our homes. In her poetic prose I found solace and friendship, it was as if she wrote the book just so I could run my fingers over its pages and soak in her words. She knew, as I am discovering, that our terribly beloved city belongs not to the traffic that encompasses it or the smog that chokes it, but to those of us, like Dee Williams, Margo Guryan, Joan Didion, and myself who choose to see the magic of the city in between the mundane.

Many a-map of Los Angeles have been created and sold-- from starmaps to foodie maps there is something for everyone. Yet these pieces of plastic function merely as a kistch representation of my beloved city. On a thrifted tablecloth I am embroidering locations significant to myself and to these women as they are scattered through our city. Dee Williams car wash, Joan Didion's favorite bend of the 101, and the burger shop with the best burger in Santa Monica my boyfriend stumbled upon. By taking the cartoon map, something seen as kitsch, and a thrifted and repurposed white lace-trimmed tablecloth, I am able to repurpose and subvert the initial intention and use of both. The cartoon-like car wash is an object of the masses layered over a symbol of bourgeois taste, the symbol being the tablecloth, a something white and pristine to eat food over repurposed into art. Finally, I am able to incorporate the identity of women in art by using embroidery, a medium that has been relegated as a hobby for most of its history. In his article “Women speaking through embroidery: using visual methods and poetry to narrate lived experiences,” Puleng Segalo writes, “As a form of narrative, embroideries lend themselves to multiple interpretations, moving away from the universal idea of understanding the world and ways in which people make meaning of it. History, the present, and anticipated future can be weaved together in this art form, thereby showing the interconnectedness of existence.” With this project, I will be able to weave the collective histories of Los Angeles, Dee Williams, Joan Didion, and myself interconnecting all of our experiences with the city.

Works Cited
David L. Ulin, “Both Sides of Sunset: Photographing Los Angeles,” Places Journal, June 2015. Accessed 05 Oct 2022. https://doi.org/10.22269/150615
“Dee Williams.” Rema Hort Mann Foundation, web.archive.org/web/20210924213952/www.remahortmannfoundation.org/project/dee-williams/
“Dee Williams Memorial Exhibition December 27, 28, 29, 12-5 Pm.” Facebook, www.facebook.com/events/1836528826491785?ref=newsfeed.
-, Eric Mercado, et al. “Know Your Streets: La Cienega Los Angeles Magazine.” Los Angeles Magazine, 27 June 2017, www.lamag.com/mag-features/know-streets-la-cienega/.
“From Hollywood to Malibu: Mapping Joan Didion's Los Angeles > News > USC Dornsife.” USC Dornsife College News RSS, dornsife.usc.edu/news/stories/3173/joan-didions-map-of-los-angeles/.
“La Cienega (Chandelier).” EMuseum, 1 Jan. 1970, chapman.emuseum.com/objects/1651/la-cienega-chandelier?ctx=0c2920ec2e882ecac69511beab71c514ccb53e9c&idx=94#.
“Lost and Found: Reading Joan Didion in California.” Los Angeles Review of Books, 1 Jan. 2020, lareviewofbooks.org/article/lost-and-found-reading-joan-didion-in-california/.
Segalo, Puleng. (2018). Women speaking through embroidery: Using visual methods and poetry to narrate lived experiences. Qualitative Research in Psychology. 15. 10.1080/14780887.2018.1430013.