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Bringing Fantasy and Nature to Downtown
Artpoints interviews Leila Fakouri and Alison Segura
May 4, 2009
Downtown Los Angeles
Introduction:
In March, Artpoints was invited to :"Sweet Siamese", an evening multimedia event in an industrial section of downtown Los Angeles. We had no idea what to expect. What we found was a fascinating, carefully curated environment inhabited by costumed characters, performers and an eclectic mix of attendees. Intrigued, we requested this interview to discover more about the women who brought this unique environement to life.
Interview by Bonnie Barrett
Bonnie: it’s so great to see your event space in the daylight. I see the color palette a lot more today.
it’s really beautiful and its great to meet your animals (laughter).
Leila: He (the white samoyed dog) fits right in, doesn’t he?
Bonnie: but maybe you could tell me a little of the history of your endeavor and what it is you’re trying to do.
Leila: I was in San Francisco for a very long time, Nine years. I opened up an art lounge event and space called Madrone Lounge about 6 years ago. We did rotating art shows, fashion shows, film screenings, all sorts of creative events. Now, I want to focus more on the refinement of quality and more art events that would be more private, specified to a crowd of art appreciators. This space will be a design house showcase for installations, back drops for movie sets, for musicians, for plays and events.
So it was a two-fold reason for opening this space - a portfolio for me to pursue my artistic creations and a space where I could create events along the lines of what you two saw that night (Sweet Siamese). Madera and this space is open for smaller community building events, dinner parties, and film screenings. Alison and I came together to start a production company called Tree Top Productions to host large events. The event that you saw is more of the larger scale events.
Bonnie: It sounds like you came here with a desire to focus more.
Leila: Definitely.
Bonnie: Could you mention two or three examples of specific kinds of things you’d like to focus on?
Leila: Two or three is difficult because I’m focusing on so many (laughter) maybe, how about ten? I’m excited to be working with Alison on these productions that involve characters and experiences that people walk into.
Leila: Yes, bringing all of those elements together to create a visual sense of place for events and installations and all the things I mentioned before - so we our projects are bringing emerging and established (artists) together. There are so many amazing artists out there. I’m starting to see repetitions in style happening and I’m seeing a child like quality coming into art-- animals and kids and nature - a lot of organic elements coming in. There’s a cohesiveness with all these different multi layered and multi- media projectswith all these people coming together and working together. Ultimately my desire is to create a space where those intersections can happen. I’m so excited by how many similarities I’m seeing in so many artists’ work and films like that Michel Gondry style of collaging with a lot of child-like innocence. I see a lot of that happening in art right now, playfulness.
Bonnie: can you talk about trends you see right now? I wonder if because we have a new president, the world is suddenly focusing on sustainability, maybe this is what’s bring these themes up in everyone’s mind. Do you have any ideas along those lines?
Leila: I do think that having this president has spiraled that out even faster. We’ve evolved in these technological ways. Now our time period is about collaging from the past. Going back to the sense of nature, going back to your child-like dreams and imagination. I definitely see that style emerging. It’s been emerging for a while.
Allison: it’s like stripping everything down, technology, and getting down to the nitty-gritty, nature and the basics.
Leila: The sky is the limit as well. It’s like the dream world.
I was so excited by your questions in the email that I’m already going to those directions. These questions you haven’t even asked yet. Surrealism, obviously, based in dreams and “the skies the limit” very much influenced me.
Bonnie: Could you speak of a specifically about a surrealist painter who influenced you?
Leila: Remedios Varo is my favorite and she is very hard to find. Are you familiar with her?
Bonnie: No, but I will look her up.
Leila: I studied women’s art history at the San Francisco Art Institute. I studied the published work of Whitney Chadwick, a female art scholar. You couldn’t find women in history books before her research. She’s curated exhibitions at the SFMOMA. Remedios Varo is an example of a woman who was at the forefront of the surrealist movement but you can’t find her at all. If you do, you’ll be blown away by her stuff. Dali is everywhere. He’s on your toilet paper, on magnets, on everything. She and Dali interacted, as a group of people that affected each other.
Alison: Where is she from, is she from the US?
Leila: She was from Spain. She also has ties to Brazil and South America.
Bonnie: That makes sense, the Spanish painter de Chirico influenced the Surrealists, perhaps she was swimming in that same soup.
Leila: I wanted to mention her because the worlds she portrays are so amazing. I was fortunate enough to see two of her pieces at the Whitney Chadwick women’s realist show at the SFMOMA years ago. You can feel something in them. Today we have a lot of people doing this, you see that in a lot of art these days where the eyes are out of proportion to the face like Mark Ryden.
Bonnie: I notice you have some of his work.
Leila: Yes, I love his stuff. But going back to the surrealism, the reason I brought that up was it feels like another version of that happening right now.
I feel that one (movement) that’s happening now is based out of a kind of Surrealist approach. I believe that all art is based on doing what you want - the sky is the limit. When you get to Surrealism it’s based in the dream world. You can make a sculpture, put it into a film, and then you can draw over the shot in after effects. Then that film can be shown in a unique art space. That’s the exciting thing. With Madera Design, I will make installations for a film, shoot the film, and then showcase the films at the space.
Alison: One thing that we’re proud of in the last event is the way it was curated, one performance led to another, each fed off of the previous, it was seamless, that’s what we were hoping to do.
Leila: yes, it worked pretty well and we’re excited about the next series that we’re doing, it’s taking up a notch. The characters in this event were more archetypal - the Groucho Marks character, the Siren, the Gypsies, the burlesque dancers. The next series we’re doing will be much more fanciful, blurring the line between human and creatures.
Bonnie: Interesting. Can you talk a little bit about how digital technology is influencing you?. In years past, making a film or making a recording was very difficult and expensive. Are we to the point now that digital technology is so here that we don’t need to think about it anymore, so that we can just use it?
Leila: I think so. My degree is in photography. I built a darkroom in my house in Oakland. I had a 1977 Color Processor because I didn’t want to only do black and white. I was the epitome of someone who would put so much energy and time into one print. I began to realize there were ideas I couldn’t accomplish in film. I studied graphic design in high school before I studied photography. I went to UCLA in the design department. I switched to photography; I wanted to get my hands dirty. I began to release that I wanted to combine graphic design and photography. I did experiment withnegatives like Jerry Uelsmann - he’s a really amazing negative sandwicher, cutting and assembling and making it seamless and beautiful.
Now we have the computer and you can, boom, do it. I started having ideas of patterns and repetition that were difficult in the darkroom-things that digital is so great for.
The one thing I always come back to is that grain is so beautiful - the circle versus the square. -pixilated so the balloons in the sky look like squares of colors- I love playing on that, when you just want the beauty, the pure beauty of the organic nature that made the grain, nothing compares to the circles of grain.
Alison: You can compare it to vinyl versus a CD; on a record you have all the scratches and nuances that you can’t get at all if you listen to a CD.
Leila: That’s the design vibe that in our designs and productions we’re going for--marrying technology and the organic. The feeling of it is more the grain, more the vinyl. That’s where the classic, organic kind of feeling comes, more based in nature, creatures and fantasy.
Alison: Its going back to what you were saying - the child-like. Imagination, we’re going back to that.
Leila: There so much beauty that’s come before us, so many amazing magical things. What’s so cool about this day and age--this is the first time that everything is being put together. People did borrow a little bit but not in its entirety.
Bonnie: Right, and people couldn’t communicate across wide geographical areas and share imagery in ways we now take very much for granted. I thought about similar issues in my own work, I’m a graphic designer, I started out as a hand-lettering artist so I started with the round pixels too - doing things by hand. I feel the same hunger to get back to my pens and my brushes, even though I love not having to send out to a type house like I used to have to.
For the early years of desktop publishing and Photoshop, everyone was just focused on learning the technology. I often show my students early collage work from people like Hanna Hoch and John Heartfield, and I say, these people didn’t have Photoshop but what they created is better than 99% of what’s being done today.
Alison: That’s probably because of the time they spent on it and the thought.
Bonnie: They had something to say, it wasn’t surface decoration.
Leila: Yes, it wasn’t an advertising campaign.
Bonnie: I think the technology has evolved to the point where we don’t have to focus on it anymore. We can start working with the vocabulary rather than learning it.
Leila: I do graphic design as well. It is so fun to go into Google images and put in any word and see what you come up with- start collaging those together and its just craziness. It’s definitely exciting and good to develop your style within that world.
Alison: to learn about yourself and fine-tune your point of view. Go from that, take all these beautiful things and resources that are available to you and do your thing.
Bonnie: Was there a reason you felt you could realize this dream and do this work in Los Angeles than in the Bay Area?
Leila: I grew up in Southern California, I never thought I’d come back. The Bay Area for me was Art, Progressive, more about the soul and learning to doeco-friendly things in the world. The Bay Area does represent that beautifully. I came to realize that how magical San Francisco is and how much it has to offer in ways that nowhere else in the world does. It feels small and so limiting at some point, like the starving artist syndrome is the whole way to be. Maybe it came from the 60’s- it’s not cool to become successful or refined. To me it felt that in the art scene, you were expected to stay with your roots without becoming a commercial entity. LA is seen the place where you go to sell your soul and make a million dollars.
 
Because of the dot-com crash a lot of artists left. Many artists have come to LA where there’s more opportunity. There’s a great community here of like minded people. It is a huge place with lots of diversity. I could go on and on about how amazing Los Angeles is - the weather is pretty nice too. I love San Francisco for the magic it has, but art and business hands don’t shake as much in San Francisco.
You can make anything happen here, you can be Joe-Blow and be an artist and make really good money. I like that randomness about it. When I opened up my venue up there, after 5 years it was pretty well known and established, it had helped change the neighborhood. It was great but I felt I had so defined myself it no longer had that “Sky's the Limit” feeling to it. So LA for me is exciting, everyone you can think of that you’d want to work with comes through here or lives here.
Alison: People are hungry and they just make things happen.
Bonnie: Do you think that it’s because of the huge entertainment industry that is centered here?
Leila: I do, I think its trickled down the independent film. Once the word “Independent” became a daily used word in film and music it created more opportunities for artists. It's not really independent any more because it being funded by bigger entities. When that happened, it benefited people like us - the bridge is a lot easier to cross - you don’t have to be an artist and go into the corporate environment and do commercial work.
Alison: You can be eclectic and independent.
Bonnie: Many of the themes you’re addressing, graphic designers also think about, how to use our knowledge and our skills to do something other than sell Pepsi-Cola or promote unsustainable behavior. I think that you are right - a lot of these themes are bubbling up from a lot of areas. I wish to tell you that when I first saw this space the first thing I thought of was Womanhouse.
Leila: What is that?
Bonnie: Womanhouse was an environment that was created in an abandoned mansion in Los Angeles in 1972-73 by a group of women students from Cal-Arts supervised by Judy Chicago, Miriam Shapiro. It was different from you’ve done but it was very much about interiors and how they related to women’s inner lives and their position in society.
Could you speak a little bit about women artists, either who you’ve known or who you studied and have inspired you?
Leila: Remedios Varo is up there for me. Not a lot of well-known artists are coming to mind, personal experience has more defined what I’ve done here.
My dad is Persian and we lived in Iran for a while. My parents traveled all over the world and antiques were everywhere. I grew up with the Persian aesthetic of florals and nature-- a combination of the Victorian and the antique and the wood and the Persian. We had a beautiful overgrown garden in Orange County - a secret garden feeling. So the main contribution to my aesthetic is just what I had around me. My mom is an interior designer, so our home was never a hodgepodge, it was always very beautiful. My dad’s a re-user, the vintage shopping thing came from him. I go into stores and see vintage things and get inspired. There’s a million cool things to see and buy. I’m sure there are many women artists I’ve studied that unconsciously played a part but I don’t see a single one of them with a style I am attempting to encapsulate.
I like the sculptural, biological pieces byEva Hess and Francesca Woodman's black and white photographs of old houses. I like the feeling of broken down and worn interior spaces. Not anyone specifically, just the feeling of female iconography, doll houses, of miniatures, fabrics and quilting.
In art school I had a very progressive, feminist instructor, Linda Connor, who is well know for her photography done in the 60’s and 70’s. Her work avoided traditional female stereotypes. I went head to head with her in college. I had this whole series of things that included quotes from the bible about women. She asked why I was doing such cliché things about women. I wanted to express a female perspective, that was not cool. I was never trying to make a statement about domestic things, it just came out, it was a natural inspiration for me. I like the idea of bringing it into the industrial space.
Bonnie: You’ve chosen to bring it here to downtown Los Angeles. This is one of the things that makes this space so amazing when you walk through the door, it’s as if you have entered another world.
Leila: I like the idea of nature taking over and where better than in the most industrial gritty spot possible, Los Angeles downtown.
Alison: When you look around downtown are no trees.
Leila: One thing about industrial spaces is that they lend themselves to a "Sky is the Limi"t type of design. You can do anything with them. If you go into a residential space it’s already defined itself in certain ways with its architecture and layout. In places like this it is blocks and miles of boxes. I love the neutral aspect of industrial areas.
I lived here for a year and a half. Now I live in Silverlake, and I’m so happy to be in a neighborhood with interesting architecture and little coffee shops and trees, That’s more satisfying to live in, but for art and creative projects I love downtown. Its also cowboy country because its just starting out, its the next frontier. Development is happening so quickly right now. There are so many places where you just don’t know what’s going on insidewhere artists have built out beautiful spaces - you just don’t see it from the outside.
Alison: Artists are beginning to open their doors, the Brewery for example, has been there for a long time. They have two events a year where you can walk through the artists’ homes, not only is the art beautiful but their space is also beautiful.
Leila: People are beginning to give it attention. I hope that it doesn’t over-develop too quickly so the style has time to settle and mature.
Bonnie: Maybe its a positive development that instead of kicking artists out of their lofts in real old buildings they’re building lofts from scratch now. Leaving the derelict buildings to us.
Leila: That’s what’s so good about LA because it’s so spread out. When I was twenty-two, I refurbished a rented warehouse South Market. That’s when everything happened, nine years ago, it was just the saddest thing. I had come towards the of end of it, just before the dot com boom. I knew people who built their dreams inside warehouses for ten years. They weren’t the owners so as soon as the buildings were in demand, they had to go. San Francisco is so small there’s no space to grow into. Here there is more time and room for spreading out. I’d love to ultimately own something here so you can do whatever you want with it.
Bonnie: This has been an interesting conversation. I’m very glad you responded so well to all my questions.
Leila: I was so excited by the questions; no one’s asked me about female artists and its funny because that’s been a passion of mine.
Bonnie: That whole female artist movement with Womanhouse really gestated here in LA in the early 70’s. We are all children of our times.
Leila: I’m so surprised I’ve never heard of that and I’m so excited to check it out.
Bonnie: A lot went on in those years, Vietnam, Roe v. Wade --it was a big time. We did not have classes in feminist art. There were performance art pieces being done; it was all very sketchy and very new. Its great that you don’t have to fight that battle to exist.
Leila: I’m looking at this space and I know it has a very feminine feeling. I have the potential to do design with a more masculine feeling. When I create my ultimate personal space, naturally its going to be this. I want it to be accessible to everyone. Just on a side note I’ve been thinking of things I can bring in that are more boy related. I’m going to add some old planes and old cars to the space. I want to turn it into a wonderland for kids in general. I don’t want to be pigeonholed as a female designer; I want it to be playful in a childlike way. My natural sensibility is curlicues and flowers, but there so much art out there that’s about little girls and you don’t find that much about little boys.
Mark Ryden and other artists are all doing little girls and animals, but you don’t see the boys as much. So I’ve been taking a second look at the space. It happened so fast, I've had it for a year and a half and then we had our event. I want it to be well rounded, one could walk in here and not know that a woman designed it. Back in the day of Art Nouveau it was very feminine, everything was rounded corners and flowers. Alphonse Mucha constantly drew women. I love that whole era and that whole aesthetic. For a long time I felt that mass production had that linear masculine type of direction and now the rounded corners are coming back in and I don’t think rounded corners and organic things are exclusively female, its natural human, its organic.
Alison: I also think that clean lines and simple spaces have a tendency to feel more masculine, IKEA furniture for example.
Leila: That’s how it feels, it is interesting that that’s how it’s labeled and thought of, that curvier corners are feminine and straighter lines are masculine.
Bonnie: Things progress, Art Nouveau was followed by Art Deco that went more toward the geometric, the technology obsessed, speed.
Leila: Which I really like that era as well because it had a nice balance of the curves and the cleaner lines. There’s something to be said for the edited down rather that always over the top craziness that Art Nouveau can be.
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