Because I was born in Chico and raised in Sacramento, the flatness of this Valley, the smell of the earth on hot summer nights, the view from one mountain range to another is in my blood. The silos are the icons. I asked my friend, Elaine Corn, to be my driver and went searching for silos to add to my sculpture project.
Someday I'd like to fill a whole gallery with interpretations of these industrial forms. As a child, reading my parent's Fortune Magazine, I was always captivated with the advertising for petroleum facilities, with cacophonies of pipes, textures and colors.
We drove North on 99/70 to Nicolaus, and hit the jackpot with an abandoned rice mill, now home to airplane parts. This part of Nicolaus, just off the East side of 99, is not the actual town, East Nicolaus, that lies just to the West, snuggled up to the levees of the Sacramento River.
What I love about these structures is the fragmented, precarious, jerry-built nature of the architecture. Function over form, with the whole enhanced by a wild patchwork of corrugated metal.
Little boxes perched as if they were dropped by mistake.
The view to the South.
The view to the East, standing on the levee, a view seen from Sacramento, except on a very rare, clear day.
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