After the Flood, by Clay Debevoise
Clay Vajgrt, Artist/Curator/Director
Thumbprint Cellars Gallery
36 North St., Healdsburg, CA
July 24th - September 23rd, 2007
What Flood?
statement by Clay Debevoise
Portrait of ClayD by CaliD (age 7)
By the last day of 2005 my storage room in Petaluma, CA with all my art, had 4 feet of water in it from the San Francisco Bay. The alarm was raised in the middle of New Year's night but I didn't know until a letter came from the storage management a week later, after I got out of the hospital. I had had four surgeries ('cranies') for a brain tumor in 9 months and was supposed to be running out of time. At the end of January a friend of an old friend of mine in CT got four other Bay Area men and women together for a salvage crew to help me. I didn't know any of them but the results of their efforts are now on view at Thumbprint Gallery.
Star VanHala looks at Other Hands portfolio in Thumbprint Cellars Gallery
With just art at stake it's tempting to play with "flood" as a concept. I never went back to the hospital but certainly feel like I went through a flood: the flood of a life out of control. Anyone know the feeling? We have rivers and reservoirs we count on to maintain their banks. Then they don't. I'm thinking of our lifetimes: past, and with the future prospect of warming, flooding. Even with the current drought our lives are bubbling with change. We are in the wake of the flood of incomprehensible global communication from new technological, and therefore neural, networks. Just last month the headlines read: our DNA talks to itself! Surprise, surprise. Good thing everything we need to know we learned in kindergarten, and that it feels so good to share. I have a bio-dig reservoir in mind.