Nancy Spiller
Making art since a kid, I've always put more effort into doing than showing it. So, when we lost our Pacific Palisades townhome to the January fire, the work lost was a deeply personal collection. One exception was my Reverse Trash Streams: The Junk Mail Project, shown in 2007 at Culver City's L.A. Contemporary Gallery. A year's worth of my home's junk mail, 157 pounds, was shredded and installed as if a tsunami wave from the gallery wall, my painting series Shredded, abstractions taken from the shredded mass, hung nearby. Art in America took note. Subsequently installed in our living room, it filled a six foot tall plexiglass tower and cubes, serving as the television stand we decorated lavishly for the holidays. My paintings hung on the adjacent wall. As I painted them, that second fall we lived in our canyon home at Topanga State Park's edge, a wildfire one ridge over kept me looking out the studio window for flames. That show's statement declared art making as an act of faith. Nearly two decades later, flames consumed the project and paintings, along with our home. The result: art making today for me remains an even more necessary act of faith.
Nancy Spiller is a visual artist, recovering journalist, creative writing instructor for UCLA Extension Writers' Program and the author of "Entertaining Disasters: A Novel" (with recipes) and the author illustrated memoir "Compromise Cake: Lessons Learned from My Mother's Recipe Box."
Nancy Spiller is a visual artist, recovering journalist, creative writing instructor for UCLA Extension Writers' Program and the author of "Entertaining Disasters: A Novel" (with recipes) and the author illustrated memoir "Compromise Cake: Lessons Learned from My Mother's Recipe Box."