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Jan 29
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City’s junk becomes a cautionary artistic vision
By Victoria Dalkey, Bee Art Correspondent, Friday, Jan. 27, 2012
Gioia Fonda’s drawings begin as photos of street debris.
You would expect an exhibition at a college gallery to be educational. Gioia Fonda‘s show at the James Kaneko Gallery on the American River College campus is that in spades. Fonda documents every step of the labor-intensive process by which she creates her masterful drawings of piles of junk. This body of work, one of which won the best of show award at last year’s State Fair art show, is a poignant comment on a sad aspect of the economic downturn our city has been experiencing.
She begins with color photos of trash piled up on the street in front of houses in her neighborhood. “Most of the piles,” she writes, “seem to occur when an address has experienced an eviction, a foreclosure or sometimes a death: always some kind of transition.” Like canaries in coal mines, they are harbingers of worse things to come. For Fonda, they represent “not only a reflection of the lending crisis but also a comment on our rampant consumerism and the utter disposability of what we produce and what we buy.”
Gioia Fonda stands in front of her winning state fair art piece, “Pile, With Soccer Ball.” The acrylic on canvas art piece placed first in the 2011 California State Fair and is currently displayed in the Kondos Gallery. Tony Wallin wallintony@yahoo.com
That is scarcely a new idea, but Fonda treats it with a mixture of sadness and a formal integrity that lends the piles a kind of monumental grace. The giant pile with a soccer ball, a potted plant, an old bike and a wheelbarrow that was shown in the State Fair exhibition is on view here and is even more imposing in the smaller Kaneko gallery.
Surrounding it are other drawings, among them “Watering Can,” a triangular pile of trash in which a watering can plays a small but significant role. A trio of drawings on the wall across from it features tangles of netting, worn tires, plastic jugs, and a stuffed toy. These are not only commentaries on our throwaway culture but strong abstractions reminiscent at times of Bauhaus Constructivism.
As interesting as the finished drawings are, a series of works that demonstrate how Fonda arrives at her destinations. She begins with the color photos, then isolates the shapes of the objects in the piles, draws them on paper and cuts them out. These cuttings she piles up and arranges into collages from which she then makes Xerox prints. It’s a lengthy, exacting and time-consuming process, but it pays off with drawings that are both moving and formally elegant.
Accompanying Fonda’s works at the campus gallery is a series of mostly small bronze and ceramic sculptures by Garr Ugalde. Their imagery is both innocent and menacing. Combining childhood toys with instruments of war, they comment on “how quickly the world engages its children in war.” “Beehive Rocker” places a child on a crude rocking horse surrounded by alphabet blocks. A beehive placed over the child’s head adds a surreal note of danger. “Pecker” combines grenades and bird skulls. “Night Mother” gives us a pregnant woman with a birdhouse on her head.
Children’s toys and the use of bird imagery, Ugalde writes, “speak to the ideal of freedom, innocence, and the safety of home.” Though superficially, he notes, they seem to be innocuous, lurking among them are instruments of destruction, many derived from war toys. Ugalde’s small works made of bronze are intricate and imbued with a dark humor that turns disturbing as you note the details in them. A larger piece made of ceramic is blunter. Titled “I Used To Carry a Big Stick, Two,” it gives us a pit bull with a grenade in its mouth sitting on a block covered with an American flag. Small texts cite places in which confrontations have occurred, among them Wounded Knee, Guantánamo and Havana. Ugalde’s work is a nice complement to Fonda’s and the two visions result in a show that is both moving and thought-provoking. Curator Ramsey Harris has done a great job of installing the show.
GIOIA FONDA: THE PILE SERIES
GARR UGALDE: WAR STORIES
What: Gioia Fonda lends a monumental grace to piles of refuse that she sees as “a comment on our rampant consumerism and the utter disposability of what we produce and what we buy.” A complementary exhibit of small bronze and ceramic sculptures comes from Garr Ugalde. His imagery is both innocent and menacing, a comment on “how quickly the world engages its children in war.”
Where: James Kaneko Gallery, Room 503, American River College, 4700 College Oak Drive, Sacramento
When: 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Mondays-Thursdays, 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Fridays, or by appointment, through Feb. 8
Cost: Free
Contact: (916) 484-8399
© Copyright The Sacramento Bee. All rights reserved.
Also see: Art instructor, Gioia Fonda wins State Fair competition
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Jan 21
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Passions Grow Over First Native American Saint
By Sebastian Smith (AFP) – January 17, 2012
FONDA, New York — Gazing down a frozen New York field, the statue of a Mohawk girl about to become the first Native American saint exudes calm. Yet the real Kateri Tekakwitha had a brutal existence — and ghosts from her dramatic life still haunt these hills. The 17th-century figure will make history when the Vatican canonizes her later this year, although the joy among America’s indigenous tribes will be mixed with some painful historical memories.
Kateri Tekakwitha will become the first Native American saint in the Catholic church (AFP/File, Stan Honda)
No other “Indian”, as the original inhabitants of the United States and Canada are widely, but wrongly, called, has made sainthood. Following centuries of being dispossessed, caricatured, or ignored, Native Americans will soon have the unusual experience of appearing in a positive light. Mark Steed, the Franciscan friar heading the Kateri Shrine on the banks of the Mohawk River, said that after more than 30 years of working among Native Americans, he is happy to see them win this boost. “They were put down, bypassed,” Friar Mark, a soft-spoken but steely tough 71-year-old, said. “So I think when you have a repressed people, any star in their crown is a plus.”
For many Native Americans, especially among the Mohawk and other Iroquois tribes straddling the US-Canadian border, Kateri’s sainthood was overdue decades ago. The Vatican needed a certified miracle from the three-centuries-dead tribeswoman and so followers submitted reports of dozens: everything from healing the sick to levitating a man off the ground and appearing herself, hovering in deerskin clothes. None of these passed muster. But then in 2006 doctors in Seattle confirmed an astonishing event. Against all medical expectations, an 11-year-old Native American boy fatally ill with a flesh-eating bacteria made a full recovery. His parents had been praying to Kateri. Although needing another five years, this one convinced the Vatican, and last month Pope Benedict XVI cleared Kateri for canonization. Her followers may not have a date yet, but they are already excited. “It will be a celebration of first magnitude,” proclaims the January issue of the shrine’s Tekakwitha News.
Friar Mark Steed at the National Kateri Shrine in Fonda (AFP/File, Stan Honda)
Kateri’s life story encompasses the despair and — for some — the hope sown in those tumultuous early years of the white settlers. According to Jesuit accounts and oral history, Kateri survived a settler-introduced smallpox epidemic at four, but was left orphaned and near-blind. The next calamity was a raid by French settlers and native allies who burned her village to the ground. Again she survived, spending the next decade in a newly built village across the Mohawk River in the woods near today’s Kateri Shrine. It was here, when she was about 20, that she was baptized and entered the crucial last four years of her life.
Ostracized by her tribe, Kateri — whose native name Tekakwitha translates as “The Clumsy One” — fled to a village of converts in what is now Canada. Despite being ravaged by illness, she tended to other sick and lived a life of extreme asceticism — including burning herself with hot coals — that attracted admiration from missionaries and converts alike. Tradition has it that when she died, aged 24, her smallpox-scarred face suddenly cleared. That story still inspires people around Fonda to gather in the shrine’s open-air chapel in summer, or in the 230-year-old wooden barn housing a chapel where a large painting of Kateri hangs behind the altar. But intertwined is the dark history of European conquest and the role played by Christian conversions. Tom Porter, who lives a short drive down the road from the Kateri Shrine, believes Kateri unwittingly contributed to the destruction of her people. “She was used,” he said in a rare interview.
Statue of Kateri Tekakwitha by Joseph-Émile Brunet at the Basilica of Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré, near Quebec City.
Unlike many modern Mohawks who have either converted or are not interested in any religion, Porter works actively to restore the old beliefs. He lives with family and a handful of followers on a farm where they grow their own crops, raise cattle and use work horses to plow the earth. A longtime Mohawk acting chief, Porter is immersed in the spiritual ways of his forefathers. Inviting a reporter to join a huge family meal in the compound’s main house, Porter, whose native name is Sakokwenionkwas, or “He Who Wins”, said the moon, the sun and thunder are more important to the Iroquois than saints or popes. “Christianity is not a shoe that will ever fit. Not for my feet, or my heart, or my soul,” he said. A humorous man, Porter carries echoes in his face of the proud, eagle-like features seen in old pictures of tribesmen. But he could not conceal his bitterness. To him, there is no difference between the spread of Christianity and the cruel policies, including forced assimilation in grim 20th-century government boarding schools, that were used to subjugate Native Americans.
Aged 67, Porter has made sure every one of his five daughters, one son, and 11 grandchildren follows the traditional ways. He thinks Kateri was probably forced to become a Catholic. “I don’t know if she really was a Christian or not,” he said. “They were in poverty at that time. The Europeans had destroyed everything, people were destitute and starving, and if you wanted to get help of any kind you had to be a Christian.” Porter conceded that few Mohawk agree with him. He even admitted that some in his extended family are devoted to Kateri. “It breaks my heart,” he said. Friar Mark acknowledged that there had been “terrible” sins and was determined to heal the wounds.
In the wooden chapel at the Kateri Shrine, a native blanket covers the altar. Snowshoes and deerskins hang from the rafters, and sacred herbs like tobacco and sage lie drying. There’s a crucifix, of course, but also a picture of the tree and turtle at the center of the Native American creation legend. Soon after taking up his position in Fonda a year ago, the tall Canadian friar went to call on Porter. “He was amazed,” Friar Mark recalled. Since then, the two have met often and while they don’t agree, they listen to one another, an odd couple making peace on the spot where a future saint once lived. “He’s a friend,” Porter said of Friar Mark. “When I was growing up, there was no one who hated priests and nuns more than I did. But I got over that now. All my enemies — they became my good friends.”
More links: USA Today, About.com, Wikipedia
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Dec 03
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POPLAR BLUFF, Mo. — Elbie Fonda set high goals for the 2011 football season. The Caruthersville senior wanted to run for 3,000 yards and lead his team to a state championship. For a shot at one, however, he had to sacrifice the other. “We believed he could do it, but as things progressed, we wanted to take care of his body because we were hoping for 15 games,” Caruthersville coach Nathan Morgan said. “He understood that and did exactly what was needed without question.”
Caruthersville's Elbie Fonda was presented with the Carr Trophy during Wednesday's Poplar Bluff Letter Club's Gridiron Banquet. (Brian Rosener ~ Daily American Republic)
Fonda put together an outstanding season, one good enough to earn him the Carr Trophy as the most outstanding player in the SEMO Conference. Fonda was presented the award Wednesday night during the 66th annual Poplar Bluff Letter Club Gridiron Banquet. Fonda is the fourth Caruthersville player to win the award, given annually since 1979, and the first Tigers player since Kendrickus Reed in 2006.
Jimmy Jackson, Caruthersville’s first Carr winner in 2003, was an assistant coach for the Tigers this year and held the school record Fonda was shooting for — 2,564 yards rushing. “He’s like an inspiration to me,” Fonda said about Jackson. “Make me want to win it. I wanted to be better than him.”
The 5-foot-9, 180-pound running back ran for 1,889 yards and 25 touchdowns during the regular season to lead the conference. He averaged 12.6 yards per carry. He finished with 2,602 yards combined rushing and receiving and scored 33 times to go with 31 tackles on defense.
Fonda shared the ball with Darrell Monroe, who also was named to the all-conference backfield. Monroe, a sophomore, ran for 1,019 yards during the regular season. “I had no problem with it,” Fonda said. “I wanted to win.” The Tigers only dropped a 56-55 thriller to Dexter for the conference title and fell to Maplewood-Richmond Heights 36-29 in the Class 2 state quarterfinals to finish 11-2.
Caruthersville's Elbie Fonda looks for running room against Dexter on Friday night in Dexter - Oct. 8, 2011 (David Jenkins ~ Sikeston Standard Democrat)
Fonda also won the scoring award in the Central and was one of five Carr finalists announced at the banquet. The other finalists were Sikeston’s James Watson, who rushed for 1,485 yards, Dexter quarterback Cody Stevens, who threw for 1,375 yards and ran for 1,184 yards, Farmington quarterback Chase Busenbark, who threw for 1,698 yards, and Chaffee’s Tyson Estes, who ran for 1,431 yards and earned the scoring award for the South. “All great athletes,” Morgan said. “It was a good class, so Elbie has something to be proud of to win it this year.”
The Carr Trophy is named in honor of the late E.E. “Bus” Carr, an early member of the Letter Club who devoted 50 years of service to area athletics serving as an announcer for radio station KWOC in Poplar Bluff. A committee composed of area high school football officials makes the selection.
Also presented with awards were Farmington linebacker Roper Garrett with the inaugural Derland Moore Award for the most outstanding defensive player in the conference. Moore, a 14-year NFL player for the New Orleans Saints who was named a second-team SEMO Conference player as a senior at Poplar Bluff, presented the award to Garrett, who had 82 tackles and 45 assists, six sacks and three forced fumbles for the state semifinalist Knights.
Jackson assistant coach Bob Sink was presented with the Sam Giambelluca Lifetime Achievement Award for his service to high school athletics over a 41-year career. He announced his retirement during the Jackson football banquet last month. The linemen awards went to Farmington’s Ethan Hennes, Zach Lacey of Dexter and Zach Estes of Scott City. Farmington’s Connor Davault won the scoring award for the North, and Knights coach Todd Vaughn was named coach of the year, along with Dexter’s Aaron Pixley and Hayti’s Justin Peden.
© Copyright 2011 Southeast Missourian. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Other links: YouTube, MaxPreps
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Nov 27
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Fonda – Better Days (Album Review)
Thanks to their dead-on instincts for engaging melodies and their heavy My Bloody Valentine influences, Better Days is a focused set of lush, dreamy pop.
In the eight years between Catching up to the Future and Fonda’s new EP, Better Days, the band’s principal songwriting duo, Emily Cook and David Klotz, have devoted their energies to some truly questionable projects: Cook contributed to the screenplay of the execrable Gnomeo & Juliet, while Klotz is the music editor for the ongoing pop-culture nightmare that is Glee. Egregious and eyebrow-raising though those credits may be, Cook and Klotz’s work here is characterized by relatively good taste. Thanks to their dead-on instincts for engaging melodies and their heavy My Bloody Valentine influences, Better Days is a focused set of lush, dreamy pop.
The massive power chords and thundering percussion line of the title track open the EP on something of a Coldplay note, but a heavily distorted lead guitar line quickly kicks in and the song’s melody takes a minor-key turn, recasting the song as an effective and on-point homage to early-’90s shoegaze. Cook and Klotz sing lead in unison on “A Love That Won’t Let You Go,” and they use off-kilter, slightly discordant harmonies to bring a real sense of tension to the track. While that approach to arrangements might not be novel (Fonda is hardly the first act to draw heavily from the Jesus and Mary Chain), it’s something they make effective use of over the course of Better Days, allowing their deliberate aesthetic choices to play as big a role as their lyrics and performances in creating the EP’s tone.
In the eight years between Catching up to the Future and Fonda's new EP, Better Days, the band's principal songwriting duo, Emily Cook and David Klotz, have devoted their energies to some truly questionable projects: Cook contributed to the screenplay of the execrable Gnomeo & Juliet, while Klotz is the music editor for the ongoing pop-culture nightmare that is Glee.
To that end, Fonda absolutely makes the most of Better Days’s scant running time. Even with the new track, “Some Things Aren’t Worth Knowing,” added to the set for this new rerelease, the EP doesn’t even scratch a full 20 minutes. None of the songs ever threaten to overstay their welcome (“In the Coach Station Light” is an unabashedly lovely two minutes), and there’s something to be said for the degree of precision Fonda brings to their songwriting, especially on the riotous, punk-inflected standout “My Heart Is Dancing.” That said, even in a market that’s increasingly singles-driven, the sheer brevity of Better Days casts the EP as more of a teaser for a bigger project than as a standalone release.
Other links: Youtube, Fondamusic, Bandcamp
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Nov 12
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Ami McKay’s The Virgin Cure
Ami McKay’s debut novel The Birth House was inspired by the former midwife’s home she and her husband bought in Nova ‘Scotia near the Bay of Fundy. Her 2011 novel The Virgin Cure also has a real-life inspiration — McKay’s great-great grandmother was a woman doctor who ministered to the poor in the 1870s in New York’s Lower East Side. Dr. Sarah Fonda MacKintosh was in the first graduating class of the medical school founded by Emily and Elizabeth Blackwell, the first women ever to practise medicine in the U.S.
Nova Scotia writer Amy McKay says she is always looking for women’s stories from the past. (Ian McKay)
Her graduating thesis was on syphilis in young girls and she moved directly into residency at the Blackwell sisters’ infirmary for the poor in Manhattan. The Blackwells’ infirmary was the only hospital that would accept a woman doctor at the time — the medical field considered too crude for ladies. At the time, that part of Manhattan was home to waves of immigrants and destitute people of all backgrounds, and the hospital would have dealt with waves of diphtheria and cholera that killed the very young as well as venereal diseases that blighted the lives of those not much older.
McKay models her character Dr. Sadie on the women doctors of the New York Infirmary for Women and Children, but the crusading doctor doesn’t make an appearance until half-way through her new novel. The Virgin Cure is essentially a young girl’s story — of what it was like to grow up poor in a Manhattan teeming with homeless children. McKay told CBC she tried writing about this time, just after the Civil War, from the point of view of her great-great-grandmother. But the voice that emerged was not of an educated woman with a mission among the poor, but an almost illiterate girl who has grown up without love or care.
Portrait of Dr. Sarah Fonda MacKintosh
“I tried writing from a first- or third-person perspective and even from her point of view primarily, and it just … wasn’t hanging together the way I really wanted,” McKay said in an interview in Toronto. “I thought about her role in all of this and how selfless she must have been and then, when I started to think about what role would she want to take in telling this story, I realized the stories she was chasing after in her own life were of these children.”
‘We hear that and it’s in sub-Saharan Africa and it’s around AIDS and we think it’s far from ourselves — it’s easy to dismiss it. But I found it’s part of our history as well.’ —Ami McKay, author of The Virgin Cure
The protagonist is Moth, who is sold into domestic service by her mother the year she turns 12. Cruelly treated by her mistress, she is warned by the kindly butler Nestor to leave the house before the return of the master, who has a taste for young girls. Nestor helps her steal and fence some jewelry, but once the money from that has run out, she is wholly desperate. McKay gives a vivid picture of life on the Lower East Side — the packed tenements, the filth on the streets, the gangs of toughs hanging out together and the complete lack of options for abandoned children.
Moth — her name is from Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost — is used to being hungry, to fending for herself and to innovating in the face of want. But she’s also a child, prone to daydreaming of a better life, charmed by pretty things or fascinated by a dime museum of freaks and oddities. She knows she will eventually have to barter her body, though she’s far from sexual maturity, but is content to live in the present, postponing that day as long as she can. Her bleak predicament is offset with short selections from ladies’ magazines and etiquette guides, highlighting the fashions of the day and expected demeanour of young ladies. The picture of the all-American girl created by these excerpts contrasts with the paucity of Moth’s life.
Selling young bodies big business
She falls into the hands of an “infant school,” a brothel specializing in selling off the virginity of young girls. The madam invests both time and money in feeding her, dressing her and teaching her comportment and it is a reputable house, where the gentlemen are checked for disease before they are allowed access to the girls. Moth meets other young girls in training, though she doesn’t seem to make close friends as one would expect with a child so starved for affection. As loathsome as the business seems to modern readers, it was in fact spelled out in great detail in travel guidebooks of the period, which McKay found in New York archives. “It was a big machine in the city at the time. Everyone worked to keep it going — the age of consent was 10, that is astounding to me — that doesn’t change for another decade,” she said.
New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children and Women’s Medical College
The Virgin Cure by Ami McKay is the story of a girl raised in poverty in 1870s Manhattan. The Virgin Cure by Ami McKay is the story of a girl raised in poverty in 1870s Manhattan. Which brings us to the virgin cure — the title of the book refers to the belief, prevalent at the time, that intercourse with a virgin could cure syphilis or gonorrhea. Moth is aware of the bodies of young girls found in poorer parts of the city, raped and killed. Belief in the virgin cure leads to one of the climactic scenes of the book, and helps set the course of Moth’s life. It’s a sordid and wrenching subject, and not even Moth’s matter-of-fact point of view makes the scene easy to read. McKay is forcing readers to face an unpalatable fact of 19th-century life that she herself discovered by combing through archives of the period.
The parallel with the myth, circulating in the developing world today, that sex with a virgin can cure AIDS, is one of the touchstones of McKay’s story. “We hear that and it’s in sub-Saharan Africa and it’s around AIDS and we think it’s far from ourselves — it’s easy to dismiss it,” McKay said. “But I found it’s part of our history as well.” McKay said she herself refused to believe the practice was so prevalent in the 1870s, until a doctor at the downtown hospital that replaced the Blackwells’ infirmary pointed out the significance of the title of her own great-great-grandmother’s thesis. McKay has no diaries or letters from Dr. Sarah Fonda MacKintosh, nor does she have the thesis itself, only the title. If the crusading doctor had been writing about congenital syphilis, she would have studied both boys and girls, and if she had been talking about prostitutes, her title would have been syphilis in young women. But Dr. MacKintosh wrote about syphilis in young girls — girls used and discarded and faced with a bleak, unhealthy future because there was no cure.
Pot-boiler of a read
As in The Birth House, McKay uses spritely storytelling to draw readers into this world. Her dialogue is true to the period and her description enough to quickly paint scenes without an excess word. The Birth House became a best-seller by word of mouth — passed from mothers to daughters to grandmothers and snapped up by book clubs. The author says that success bought her time to write this book. Despite its gruesome subject, The Virgin Cure is a quick pot-boiler of a read and will appeal to the same audience — people interested in the real world of women 140 years ago.
McKay said she is fascinated with women’s stories from history. “There are so many accounts of men’s lives, men’s work. There are accounts or diaries and you can find them easily. Whereas with women’s lives, I felt a real sense of having to track them down and then I found there are a lot of missing pieces. That’s where fiction came in, filling in those gaps,” she said.
Links: Find-A-Grave