Christopher will be visually charting the couple's wedding.
Christopher is a landlord who lives in Los Angeles. A lot of his artwork is about maintenance. Sometimes it is about sponsorship. This year he sponsored a team of explorers to locate the most Northern point of land on earth. Earlier this summer he was afforded the opportunity to work at the Jungfraujoch, a high altitude research station in Switzerland where he produced a project called "An Atlas of the Sun." Currently he is working on a video documenting the time he got lost at sea and washed up on an island off the coast of California. Once when he was paddling out to surf at an offshore reef in Hawaii, he saw a shark jump out of the water to attack a fish. He kept paddling out anyway. Another time, he tried to climb the Matterhorn but was turned back by poor conditions. He decided to try again when he was old to make it more fun.
August 2011
Bec and I met with Chris and after touring around his chalky waxy surfishly mappish studio, we sat drinking pink lemonade. I say those adjectives since we didn't really have a studio visit, but a studio breeze-through, a coversation around the work, but not about it directly, and it left those impressions, and they stuck with me. Maps and resonances of maps, paintings that were map-like and charts that seemed like they should be maps were interspersed throughout the surf carcasses. These strewn and stacked once-were, remodeled or board-like boards, sanded and monumental had a casual quality, a confidence, that said to me that it was art without having to say it was art. He even remarked that some people are scared to combine one's passions with the way in which one makes art. He has a passion for hiking, and painting, surfing and climbing, mapping and sculpting, writing and charting etc, and he's not afraid to bring the acts of one into the acts of another. Chris has a way of talking that makes you want to listen closely - smarts that are more than evident without pretense, and a way of giving you entry to his complexities with friendliness. It was all a solid armature for the conversation we had overlooking the garden about the wedding's seating charts.
Chris wanted to know how important it was for Bec and Ruben to have control over who sat where. The conversation went from no, its not important, to well, it is somewhat important, at least for the family's sake, to witness the ceremony together - to share those moments that will outlast the day. He's got the backbone of a plan in place in which the way in which the charts fit together, not unlike a puzzle, would be the way to discover where a guest would sit. We germinated on the family issue of togetherness, and Bec came up with a brilliant solution, so that Chris' idea maintained its strength, and so the family would witness the core ceremony moments together. There will be two seatings. The ceremony seating will have the family's spots demarcated, and the dinner seating will be completely in Chris' care and will mix the friends and families together. We are after all a wonderful mosh of Bec and Ruben's family and friends, the artists, and my family and friends - and some crossovers, by the end of the day there will be sure to be more melding of all.
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