Exploring the Old Structures of Los Angeles and Fruits & Vegetables seems to have nothing to do with the other. However, they have everything to do with each other!
Los Angeles used to be an agricultural city. There were soybean, pineapple, walnut farms, among others. Real estate became more profitable. As a result, people invested in properties rather than farming.
I find it incredible that the pineapple we taste today is more or less the same as someone who ate it in 1929. Only here for a brief moment in time, we are the real ghosts of the city. Houses and buildings last longer than each one of us. Many houses and mansions were owned by the wealthy. Later they became boarding houses, shelters, abandoned buildings. Others were destroyed by fire.
I wished to have lived in some of these beautiful victorian houses. In retrospect, I did live and work in two historical places: Toll Hall at Scripps College; as an elementary school teacher in a building at the heart of Los Angeles.
Did old masters eat the fruits after they completed a still life? If what they created were considered works of art, at what point does food seize to be art? When is it ingested and become parts of the artist's body? When the food decays and no longer looks appealing to the eye? These are the weird thoughts that come into my mind during the wee hours of the night.
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