San Miguel de Allende

    A lot happened in San Miguel de Allende on January 23rd.  Most importantly it was the birthday of Senor Ignacio Allende, the man who fought for Mexican independence in 1810 and who the town is partially named after.  I went down into El Jardin only to find a huge orchestra playing classical music.  This is not what I was expecting.  It was crowded and calm, the kids playing with their shadows in the church courtyard while their parents sat in the hundreds of chairs placed before the stage listening to Beethoven, Bach and other classical composers.

   Being at least half kid myself, I laid on the ground and shot the church making it look as if it was curved rather than straight and minus the cross on top.

       Skip forward two weeks and I am back in El Jardin, only this time it is around 5pm and it's still 80 degrees outside.   Most days the sky is an expanse of blue in every direction one looks.  Today however there are wispy little "cloud-letts" momentarily covering the sun. 
    It is Saturday afternoon and most the people sitting out here in El Jardin are hispanic.  They range from toddlers to teenagers to barely living 'little old ladies'.

    The toddlers are playing with simple toys as their parents watch close by.  The teenagers stroll in groups of either all girls or boys back and forth and around the boundaries of El Jardin.  The barely living little old ladies and men crawl from place to place propped up with canes or walkers. 

    A gringa who really wanted this man to look into the face of her camera for a few pesos had me feeling sorry for the old guy.  He just looked further down into his chest as she knelt in front of him trying to get a shot of his face.  The old man doing his best to ignore Ms. Gringa continued making his way across El Jardin until she finally abandoned her task.   
    A little girl with red tights and a black and white stripped dress ran out in front of me chasing a pigeon then got distracted by a 3 legged dog sitting with the gringa beside her and her parents. 
   Suddenly a Mariachi band starts up in the pizza restaurant to the east of the church and the family sitting next to me starts singing along with them.
  Just as suddenly the church bells start ringing letting all know it's 6pm.
  The minute the sun dropped out of the sky the temperature dropped too.  By 6:30 I was getting cold so I went into Starbucks to try and write this blog.  Technical difficulties made me move to an interesting restaurant around the corner called 'Los Milagros'.  It is filled with art, both large "milagros" and the three dimensional tin box art that I love.

    I ordered my usual house salad with chicken and a glass of white wine while listening to a lovely older man serenade the customers with Mexican songs.  After an hour I went back out to El Jardin and discovered both that it was dark and that I wasn't as cold as I had been the hour previous.  There was supposed to be a light show on the church at 9:15 pm and I didn't want to miss it.
    Once I was back outside there was a cacophony of different dramas taking place.  An entire group of 20 somethings were being entertained by a Mariachi band.  Many were singing along while one young man serenading the rest of the group with hilarious theatrical antics. 

    At the same time there was a group of young men competing with each other in a form of street dancing.   There is a video on my facebook page here:  (it is the first video you see called Jesus)

http://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=10150266245930078&id=723755077#!/ycriel

    Also happening in the cacophony of El Jardin on this warm Saturday night was a group of actors and singers doing silly songs.  You can see that video at the same link above only scroll down the page to the second video. 
    Lastly there is one more video on that page that shows the last 3 minutes of the light show on the church.  It was a spectacular display complete with gregorian music that overtook the cacophony of El Jardin for 15 whole minutes.

     This doesn't happen every night in El Jardin but this week in a religious holiday called "Candelaria".  Apparently after the virgin gave birth she was cleansed and rose up into the heavens with her virginity intact.  The festival de la Candelaria celebrates this with a week long plant sale in Pargue Juarez, the ringing of the church bells all over town and day long dances in El Jardin complete with 15 minute light shows at 9:15 every night.
   In Mexico it seems people love to come together to sing and dance...  yona c. riel
  

3 years later...December 2nd

     Three years ago today I was too sick to get out of bed.  I presume it was a gloomy Sunday although I have no recollection of what the weather was like.  The 'weather' inside me was dark and depressed and as was usual for a Sunday I was supposed to work.  Work involved meeting and off loading 4 or 5 pallets from a 40 ft trailer.  The driver would call me anytime from 2pm till midnight and when he did I was supposed to go unlock the shop and off load the pallets of fresh juice into the cooler. 
   But on Sunday December 2nd 2007 I had the energy of a dying person.  My head was pounding hard behind my right eye and my nose was so stuffed up I could only breathe through my mouth.  I couldn't eat because when I did ten minutes later it would spew forth from both ends in waves of noxious bodily fluids.  I learned this the hard way before I gave up eating and drinking completely.  It wasn't pretty, death never is. 
    I remember having the thought 'People die from the flu all the time' over and over that day and I pondered calling a friend to take me to the hospital in the final hours of consciousness.  But I never made that phone call. 
    Instead I called my boss and told the automated voice on his cell phone that I was too sick to meet the truck.  After the phone call my head hurt so bad I drew a bath and sprinkled eucalyptus oil in it hoping this would help clear out what I knew to be yet another bloody sinus infection.  I had no idea that dangerous my situation was.
    Apparently after my bath I went into the bedroom to lay down and sleep off this sickness that was trying to kill me.  I dreamt of writing an article in the Eugene Weekly to tell the university students to stock up on disposable diapers for adults for the impending flu epidemic which was soon to kill off significant numbers of students.  (I had heard the flu was going around on campus and surely what I had must be the flu). 
   Four days later after hallucinating about everything from the meaning of landmarks to the funding of Hollywood through pornography I briefly heard my neighbor George's voice.  George, who suspected something was off because I hadn't put the trash out, had entered my house through the wide open back door (it was 30 degrees outside) and found me wrapped in a towel, half in and half out of my bed, my body contorted into such an unnatural shape that he thought I was dead.  I very well could have been since I remember hallucinating that my head was a Dio de Los Muertos skeleton.)
    So terrified was George that he ran back to the house yelling to his wife Betty "Yona is dead, she is dead..... I just know she is".
   Betty Like George is from Brooklyn and both had served in a medical capacity during WWII.
   "Call 911."  Betty says like a person used to being in survival mode.

    During my next conscious moment I was in an 'shanti wagon' in India with multi-colored beads hanging from the roof and several people I did not know surrounding me with name tags made from Bakelite Mah Jongg tiles. 

    A month later when I got out of the hospital and I looked into an ambulance I realized my hallucinating mind must have made all the life support cords into beads and the paramedics into vendors at Saturday Market.  But for the entire 30 days that I was in the hospital I believed my hallucinations were reality.  My friends, kind as they are, allowed me the artistic license to refer to the ambulance as a 'my shanti wagon in India.' 
    It was only after I got home on January 4th, 2008 and opened the door to my back room (which I fully expected to be filled with burnt out computers) that I realized I had laid there hallucinating from approximately 1pm on Sunday December 2nd till 5pm on Wednesday December 5th when I was found by George. 
   It was the right frontal lobe that was affected when the sinus infection blew through the wall between my brain and my sinus knocking me out of consciousness like someone had swung a board with a lot of force to the front of my head.  'Blam', I was down, the comic would read. 
    During those first two weeks in the hospital I only have two real memories.  The first came about as they were wheeling me into have surgery on my brain and my bed had nearly collided with that of another woman's in what must have been a busy corridor. 
   "Age before beauty" she said sitting up from her bed.  The memory still makes me chuckle because she must have seen an extremely ugly looking person when she looked at me with a purplish bloated and deformed head.
    The other memory involved seeing the tears flow from my mother's face and me thinking 'gaud I must look like shit, I made my mother cry!' 
    I continued to hallucinate while I was in the hospital and had very little understanding of reality.   I was hungry and as far as I could tell they were trying to starve me to death.  I became increasingly obnoxious as the days wore on till at some point I pulled the feeding tubes out of my nose.  I remember failing yet another swallow test and being held down by two female nurses while a third reinserted the hoses into my nose.  (That will teach me they must have thought because that is one of the most painful experiences I have ever had.)
    While I was in the hospital it took a long time for the left side of my body to start following my brain's orders again.  I couldn't feed myself or tie my shoes or read.  I felt like a frustrated infant and often had temper tantrums. 
   The first time I heard my cell phone ring (which I had demanded to get back from my best friend Tina) I picked it up and started banging it on the hospital floor to make it stop ringing.  Fortunately a friend of mine was in the room at the time and said "What are you doing?" as he took the phone away from me. 
   "I am trying to get it to stop ringing" I screamed in frustration.
   By the end of my 30 day visit I was able to eat again (21 days without food and the shaved head for my brain surgery had left me looking like a Buddhist monk according to my friend Alice and 'not very attractive' according to my friend Suzie). 

   The best I could do for the first two weeks that I was home with the help of my friend Joan was to get up at 8am for my shot of antibiotics and drink some tea then back to bed till I woke again around noon and eat a little food then another shot or perhaps a doctor's appointment.  My world had suddenly become so small and completely defined by my near fatal adventure. 
   So now it's 3 years later.  I am happy to report I can eat and walk and type (although not as fast as I used to) and start a fire and sometimes maybe even make some art.  And for the most part I am happy to be alive. 
   I will never forget all the wonderful people who came to my hospital room bringing me food and praying to their various gauds and monks that I would live.  I now know that it was my dream of love and the love I received that was responsible for my living through something that would kill most people.  I thank you all and am forever grateful for your love and attention.  yona c. riel

   

My Personal Favorites from the Show..."Neuro-pathic Passages"

     Hey friends, I know I haven't been posting much lately.   Every single waking moment has been spent  getting ready for my first solo show since my traumatic brain injury in December 2007.   It's a good sign that I have time tonight to write a brief blog despite being brain dead. 
    While working the past several days/weeks (or was it a month?) I have been revisiting my life as I  sorted through over 5000 photographs.  A few of them have jumped out and proclaimed themselves as my favorites, so I thought I'd share those with you in hopes of enticing you to come out next Friday, August 27th and see the show. 

     The first one is a closeup of the fountain in the botanical gardens in Oaxaca.  It is decorated with marigolds and amaranth, the tradition for Dios de los Muertos.  In the print the color of the water contrasts beautifully with the flowers.

     The next photograph is a distant view of the fountain.  It is still close-up but you see more than just the details.  If you look at the rocks you will notice they are red.  There is a tiny bug in Mexico called Cochineel and they use it to dye just about everything.  In this photo they have put it into the water to make it run red like blood.   I am hoping for my opening to get my hands on some and have a miniature fountain with the waters running red. 

  
    My next favorite I completely forgot about until my very last search through the photographs.  It is softly focused and reminds me of a spirit who is half of this world and half of the next one.   I like it because it is skeletons and one of them is being reflected back in a mirror off to the side.   I also really like the soft pastels-colored hues and their shocking expressions.

   
    Some of my other favorites include a few pieces that I have completed since my TBI such as the one entitled "Growing Pains".  Now that I have a little distance I can see that this piece really captured the frustration, tears and anger I experienced almost every day for the first year after my brain exploded.  I am so thankful I had such a caring, experienced and knowledgeable therapist who worked with me every week.  Here's the picture of the piece.  Eat, Cry, Sleep. 

    The next piece was done in a class at Art and Soul last year.  It is a 3 dimensional piece with the image of the head extending out a 1/2 inch from the rest of the collage using rivets and two pieces of plexiglas to sandwich the image.  I like how it came out in it's 2 dimensional manifestation also.

     This last piece captures how I feel this very moment.   It is called "Art Slave" and features a starving Buddha as the main image.  When preparing for a show I know I am not alone in forgetting about the food 'thang'.  The work has consumed every waking moment leaving no time for things like food shopping, housecleaning and sitting down to eat.  Any rent-a-wife services out there??

     That's it for now because talking about food has made me really hungry and I don't want to end up like the Buddha in the picture above.  Thanks for reading my friends and I hope to see you in just over a week at The Voyeur on Blair.  We are even going to open early (at 5pm) so you can stop by before you head out to the EC.  Yona C. Riel

The Digital Works.. the journey to the inside (continued)

     Sorry I haven't posted in a few weeks.   (have you missed me just a little)?  I been working on a show that will be at The Voyeur opening the last Friday in August so I have an excuse.  (Just saying). However today since I have a bit of time I am doing a short and sweet post about my digital work.
   Though I was online before I came to Eugene, the move from SF changed my 'online' relationship.  All of a sudden 'real' life was much quieter and as I was struggling to keep my right brain stimulated.  I searched for alternative online art sites and found one where you traded postcards with strangers in other parts of the world.  I was also using the worldwide lesbian site called Shoe and to mix things up a bit  I would often ask my online friends to trade handmade postcards.  It seemed an easy way to keep the city stimulation I was accustomed to going.  Following are some of the 'postcards' I sent.

    The one above I titled 'Thirteen'.   It's not only my favorite number but a significant part of my heritage.  I was born on Friday April 13th, my mom was born of Friday June 13th and my grandmother was born on Friday February 13th!  I was shocked when I found this out because what are the chances of THAT happening?
   The piece above is a cubist woman pondering the number 13.  It was collaged onto a 4 by 6 tarot card.  Once the collage part was done I scanned it then printed it onto watercolor paper and used a small paintbrush to manipulate the ink while it was still wet.

     The next piece was originally collaged onto a digital image of a 'found collage'.   The mannequin (a favorite subject matter of mine) is losing her head.  The piece is titled 'Evidence'.   It became particularly relevant after my brain injury with the words 'brain re-sizement' listed as 'evidence of my insanity'.

    This last piece called 'Listening' prominently shows a nude woman listening with a red flower growing like an idea out of her head.  In the upper left hand corner there is a mannequin covering her ears refusing to listen.  In the lower left hand corner there is a poem.... 'you think you can grasp me, think again.  my story flows in more than one direction.... '.  I sent this one to an online friend in Montreal.
   That's it for now my friends.  All of the work I have been writing about in the blog posts titled 'journey to the inside' will be at my show the last Friday in August at The Voyeur.  I know it's Eugene Celebration that weekend but I hope you will make time to come and see me.   As always your comments are welcome and thanks for reading!
yona c. riel

Journey to the Inside.... a 'road trip' through the art of Yona C. Riel

    Since posting my road trip in April and my 2 week excursion to San Fransisco in June, it is now time to do a different kind of trip.  Instead of talking about everybody else's art I am going to talk about my own, in preparation for my first solo show in a long time on the 27th of August at 'The Voyeur' a new gallery located on Blair between 5th and 6th.
    Going through my art of the last few decades has been like reading a visual autobiography.  Despite my diminished brain capacity I remember precisely what I was thinking/feeling while making most of it and the messages lay there on their substrates whispering secrets to me.  Perhaps this is because the art has not had a chance to 'speak' to anyone else (being locked in a closet for the last few years while I have been recovering from a traumatic brain injury (TBI)).   Hopefully the show will change all that and the art will morph into it's next life.     
   My intent for this 'journey to the inside' is to post not only pictures of the work in the upcoming show but what was going on for me when I made it.  Also I will attempt to make it linear dividing the art into pre-TBI and post-TBI because it seems to make sense that way.  I want to review one piece a day unless I run out of time, in which case you'll just have to come to the show.
   The first piece was made from a red electrical box found in the debris of a burnt house in Glenwood, Oregon.  I was there with a friend who, like myself, was attracted to the remnants after a fire.  

   Much of my work is untitled as is this piece.  (perhaps my readers will suggest one to me in the comments).   There is a broken bridge (the golden gate) in the lower right hand corner and footsteps walking away from the break.  Two entities are exchanging energy, one named e-yo and one with the word 'spirit' on her forehead.  The inside of the box has been fitted with cedar inserts painted a lime green.  For the outside of the box I sanded out most of the red and painted it black.  Then I went back in with stamps and covered the surface with white and red letters and question marks.
   In the upper left hand corner there is a scribble of confusion.  The singular spring (cut from the box spring of a couch found in the debris) serves to warp the three lines of communication between the two entities further by spiraling through them.
   At the time I made the piece I was feeling distant from myself.  So much so that I really couldn't even hear what the spirit part of me had to say.  This is the first of several pieces made during the months leading up to my injury that represent (for me) the beginning of my confused state.  I think this piece was completed about 8 months prior to 'the TBI event'.  It measures approximately 5" deep by 10" wide and 12" tall.  If you want to see it 'live' come to my show at The Voyeur on Blair St. the last Friday in August.  If you want to help me name it leave a comment here on the blog.  Thanks for reading.  Yona C. Riel

the Minimalist Blog entry.. 'The Sea Purple'

   Last night I saw the movie entitled 'The Sea Purple' at the Castro Theater.  The movie was based on a true story of a (another) young woman, Angela, who refuses to marry, only this time it takes place in the 1800s in Sicily. 
   Her father is a powerful (and abusive) man and at first tries to force her into submission by physically abusing her then locking her in a cellar.  When nothing works (and his wife brings up the issue of the priest molesting their other daughter) he finally gives in but only if Angela agrees to become a man. The small town is unwilling to accept Angela as Angelo but because her father is the quarry-master (and the most powerful man on the island) and Angelo has taken over his position they are forced to do so.  Angelo also marries her best friend Sara, who initially is shunned while attending church and asked by her mother in a poignant scene "What did you expect?"
   I did not get any screen shots of this movie but it was beautifully shot on the coast in Italy.  Even so the movie itself did not hold together well enough to be one of my favorites.  (I got spoiled by the opening night movie The Secret Diaries of Anne Lister and the documentary of Anne Lister the next day).
   It makes me wonder (again) just how many women's lives were subverted, buried and concealed due to a naturally occurring rebellious nature.   It also brings up my relationship with my father and our inability to find a way to coexist.  Was I a rebellious girl?  Indeed!  And thank the gauds (after I got out of that house) I live in a place and a time where I do not have to suffer the abuses that those before me did.  Thanks for reading...  yona c. riel
PS: tonight with the festivities beginning in the city I will be posting mostly pictures with a few blurbs interspersed...stay tuned...

Off World

    'Off World' is a movie set in 'Smokey Mountain', a notorious slum in Manila.   A few minutes into the movie we are told 30 years ago it was a small fishing village and now it is 2 million tons of garbage.  It is named 'Smokey Mountain' due to the continuous flow of methane gases that leak out of the 12 story pile of trash.  Children, 5 and 6 yrs old, and adults endlessly search through the pile looking for plastic and other saleable items for a few pesos a day. 

   Lucky, born in these slums but adopted by Canadian parents, has returned after many years to search for his kin.  He has contacted one person, Julia, who knows where he can find his brother. 
   Julia introduces Lucky to his brother Mamacita, an effeminate gay hustler who turns tricks to survive.  Keeping their connection a secret Lucky decides to crash in Mamacita's place presumably to get closer to 'her' and keep his distance at the same time. 

    Lucky falls into desolation wondering why his mother gave him away and kept Mamacita.  He wanders through the squalor in Smokey Mountain, the visuals of the slum mirroring the emptiness he feels inside, till one night he just lays down, presumably to die.  Then Julia saves him in one of the more beautiful and poignant scenes of the movie.  The plastic bags are hanging all around them like white surrender flags.  

    After Julia nurses him back to health he reveals his identity to his brother as they are walking together on Smokey Mountain.   Again, the cinematography steals the scene...

    

   By the end of the movie Lucky has re-connected with himself, his brother and his mother, fallen for Julia and we are to believe that he has found what he was looking for. 
    For me, I got so engrossed with the amazing images that the storyline lost it's momentum and I found myself confused but haunted. 
   While I was cleaning up the theater I asked a friend what he thought of the movie and he said 'I think it was just a way to show how those people were living in that slum and they could have said that in 15 minutes'.   I have to agree that the storyline felt like it was there to serve the larger purpose of educating the viewer about the conditions in the Smokey Mountain slums and yet I am still haunted by some of the most striking cinematography I have seen in a movie. 
  Thanks for reading and as always your comments are welcome..  yona c. riel