UNFURLiNG
(THE OLD ZOO – DAYDREAM LiGHT AND THE iN-BETWEEN)
On and off of back-burner thought clouds since 2004 and brought into focus for 2024, this installation is an abstracted meander through color data mined from broadly reaching investigations into wanderings and imagined possibilities. It is also very specifically about the evocation of flowers.
Hope to see you when everything comes together on June 08, 2024, in an experience that feels fun and manifests joy!
In the meantime, below on this page are details of some of the ideas and work behind the project installation.
- Kim West, 2024
SITE: THE OLD ZOO AT GRIFFITH PARK
Walking into the Griffith Park from nearly any trailhead, you can feel like you are in the middle of a wilderness after mere minutes - a tonic sensation smack in the middle of sprawling Los Angeles.
The Old L.A. Zoo on Griffith Park’s southeastern side is nestled at the junction of a few trail crossings, fronting an expansive lawn and picnic area. The remains of the zoo include a section of hillside grottos and a strip of cage enclosures. Over the past two decades, I have walked past these structures sometimes five times a week and sometimes barely once a month. Every time, they strike the same–kind of creepy, kind of beautiful. They animate imagination, each element a patinated canvas infused with memory.
RUINS: THE OLD ZOO X THE ROMAN COLOSSEUM
The site is today known locally as 'The Old Zoo'. When active, the site was known as 'Griffith Park Zoo'. Opening in 1912, consensus seems to agree that the zoo, originally hoped to be a place of magnificence and, 'A Zoo for the World!', began with a small number of animals (possibly as few as 15) of unknown origin, and closed in 1966 with over 1000. Throughout that duration, the zoo was perceived as both a charming and inspirational space in the city (Walt Disney and his animators attended regularly to draw from the animals), and an institution plagued by instability, managerial and financial concerns.
The zoo's resident population grew and shrank with perpetual donations, acquisitions, losses, and financial and political circumstances. Some animals found their way into Griffith Park Zoo by way of other locally shuttered collections and city zoos. For example, when Selig Zoo closed after having housed many of Hollywood's performance animals, those creatures were absorbed into the Griffith Park Zoo, co-mingling highly trained animals with those already in the zoo population, mixing up the already variable degrees of experiences in captivity.
I'd never thought of the Old Zoo ruins as ruins until learning that once upon a time in the 1800s, the Roman Colosseum was wildly abloom with more than 400 species of plant life, many not yet then found anywhere else in Europe. Some botanists of the time theorized that the tangles of green life overrunning the ruins were maybe descendants of seeds that had once been brought into the Roman arena via exotic animals, trafficked by bloodsport-thristy rulers and emperors over a thousand years earlier.
After hearing about the be-garlanded Colosseum while already working on concepts for a project at the Old Zoo, I wondered: what would our Old Zoo structures look like if they too had been taken over by wandering seeds? To me the Old Zoo is already seasonally stunning with myriad wild, wind, and wall flowers. But, imagining the space to be further fantastically overgrown and lush with souvenirs of blooming color from a posited ark with '900 mammals, 3500 birds, and 1600 reptiles and amphibians' that could have arrived from points traversing the globe felt like a very compelling daydream.
STUDIES
A few years back I learned about Britain's Institute for Terrestrial Ecology 1962 methodology for organizing information on the flora and fauna of the British Isles.
Small, rectangular cards were taken into the field where species data was notated by hand. The same cards were returned to an office, where field notes would be translated into representative dots. These dots were then plotted onto maps, expressing the distribution of species' locations. Eventually this data would become the basis for Atlas of the British Flora.
A collection of watercolors evolved from information found in Los Angeles newspapers from 1900-1940. First painting animals that are referenced as promised and/or actual inhabitants of the Old Zoo, and then the associated plants and flowers native to each animal's origin, this is much more an aesthetic approach to the documentation of research than a scientific one.
PALETTE, PAINTINGS, PROPORTIONS
The watercolor studies eventually allow me to create a distillation of visual information, ending up with a specific palette that references findings, noticings, and emotional responses. These colors, coupled with the site landscape as experienced today lead to more paintings, drawings and studies that help me determine various elements of the installation.
Intuitive and responsive marks made in studio paintings ultimately inform the proportion, scale, and composition of the installation elements. I enjoy the process of figuring things out in painting, and then translating those conclusions into ideas that manifest in various materiality - paper mache, fabric, ceramic, etc.
INSTALLATION ELEMENTS
Each installation element is a data point of medicinal and joyful encounters with beauty, of color floating on the wind.