“Waiting For The Next Disaster”
acrylic latex on cardboard, with radio
53” x 38” x 7”
November 1993

 

I painted this cardboard construction mounted on silkscreen frames in November of 1993, just two months before the Northridge Earthquake on January 17, 1994. I don’t know if I had a premonition or what…

When the earthquake hit we got seriously rocked. It woke us up at 4:30 in the morning, sending us flying down the hall to the stairway. In our stairway to the street we were bounced from one wall to the other, trying to get dressed. Once we got outside the power pole transformers were exploding. It was chaotic and scary.

I didn’t know that was going to happen when I painted this piece. I constructed the falling city out of layers of cardboard. There was a radio embedded in the piece tuned to a news station, continuously broadcasting the local news at a low volume.

This construction didn’t survive one of my purges of the studio. The cardboard ended up in the dumpster of time, and the frame repurposed for another painting down the road. Such things happen when you’re young and think there’s always more where that came from. That said, I miss this piece! Luckily I have a photo of it in my portfolio.