On the Trail Of...

If you've been following along on Pasadena Daily Photo you know about the al fresco art exhibit I attended last weekend at Oak Grove Park. The exhibit, called "On the Trail Of," was sponsored by NewTown and funded by grants from Pasadena Art Alliance, the Pasadena Arts & Culture Commission and the City of Pasadena Cultural Affairs Division. A few more shots:

Above, one of Three Untitled Framing Devices by John O'Brien and Cielo Pessione, "placed in relationship to where an interesting panorama could be framed." I found that you could frame the panorama with the device, or you could frame the device against the the panorama. Each device was mounted atop a base etched with a quotation. This one, by Annie Dillard, said, "Spend the afternoon. You can't take it with you."

Below, Richard Newton's Seek no evil - Fear no evil - Be no evil echoed the Tarot by interpreting three of the cards in a traditional deck. I found them all striking, but Fear no evil was especially spooky when viewed from the high path in the misty woods.

Neil Fenn's Watershed Temporary Aesthetic Improvement Program entailed the "wrapping of large numbers of rocks in blue translucent plastic paper" alluding to, among other things, "the purposes and functions of a watershed." If you click on the photo to enlarge it, you can see the meticulous work that went into creating this, with "water" trickling down from the hilltop.

Many thanks to Barbara Ellis for the photo above. (You may remember Barbara; she was good enough to lead me/us on a tour of Caltech for Pasadena Daily Photo in March.) The picture is of one of six works entitled Ponds, by Toti O'Brien. "In plain view and sheltered from casual view, ceramic boats suggest journeys, real and imagined, liberating and confounding, chosen and serendipitous." I would also add, enchanting. They were small and hard to find, even with our map of the works. I saw four before I had to go. Barbara stayed to go back over the path and find the rest. Below you see how easy they were to miss, and how much they were worth looking for.