There are people you meet in life to whom you feel a deep and immediate connection, so much so that the particulars of how and why you both arrived at the same place at the same time matter much less than the fact that you did. That’s pretty much how we feel about Su Wu, whose inspiring blog I’m Revolting we admired from afar for months before reaching out two years ago, asking her to collaborate, and becoming instant friends. Earlier this summer, however, when we found out that one of our favorite photographers would be visiting LA, we realized this was the perfect time to find out a bit more about the circumstances that led Wu to where she is right now, both philosophically and quite literally to the downtown LA loft she calls home.
Wu grew up in Northern California, went to school out East, and headed back to Los Angeles a few years ago with an old boyfriend. A surfer, she thought she’d like to be close to the beach and moved to Venice. “But I didn’t take to LA immediately,” she says. “The light was too bright; it was like you’d step outside and every flaw was illuminated. I wanted to move to the least LA place possible.” She ended up moving downtown, where urban revitalization was certainly underway but nowhere near the level it is now. “I remember it being a little more rough back then,” she says. “Now there’s a Handsome Coffee around the corner and they’re opening a holistic wellness center. My very un-LA corner now has infrared saunas and a raw juice bar,” she laughs. “But I like that. Cities are messy and it’s hard to feel a part of one unless you live in the messy part. It forces you to think about how a city is organized, and to understand why the place you live is the way that it is.”
It’s that thoughtfulness — and that need to analyze why you admire the things you do — that compelled Wu to begin I’m Revolting all those years ago. “I moved to LA and I didn’t have a job, but I was looking at things constantly and I needed a place to put them down and then think about what they might mean.” Through her blog, Wu met tons of interesting people, was named a fellow in the USC Annenberg / Getty Arts Journalism program, and began contributing to outlets like T Magazine and n+1, where she is the online arts editor. But most of it came out her love of simply looking at stuff. “It’s the great pleasure of life that something surprises you and you have that moment of unexpected recognition,” she explains. See the stuff she loves enough to live with — and the inspiring place she calls home — in the slideshow that follows.
On top of the bookshelf is a tall bowl by Andrew Kazakes (Wu’s ex-boyfriend) next to a wood-handled bowl picked up on a road trip driving around Sri Lanka. “It was the only souvenir I got. I went with Andrew and my best friend, Anat, and our lives were just beginning to fall apart, though we didn’t know it yet. We got in a car accident when the brakes on the rental car stopped working on a windy mountain road, and the guy whose car we rear-ended ended up taking us out for tea and sweets, and smoking our American cigarettes. The framed piece is a 1927 edition Max Ernst frottage. I got it for Andrew last year, and he didn’t pick it up at the framer after he left.”
“I can see the Hollywood sign and Dodger Stadium from my window, and fireworks when they win. I can also see Men’s Central Jail, the largest mental institution in the country, and one day I realized that there must be cells from which it is also possible to see the fireworks.”
“One night at dinner, Nancy (who is one of the designers of Building Block) was scoping an eBay auction of this old Interview, from November 1991. I went home and got it for her. The package had just arrived on the day of this photo so it was sitting on the counter in the kitchen. I love people with really specific taste, who are disappointed mostly and then ecstatic once in a while, and who most deserve to be spoiled.”
“I feel pretty strongly about messes, that their absence is disheartening.”
“I got the bench from a very large man who said he kept it in the back of his van to take naps; it’s carved out of one piece of wood. The stool was carved by Alma Allen (Wu’s current boyfriend) before he moved to L.A., sometime in the last century, out of wood collected at the side of the road, and lugged around as he moved.”
A bunch of old wood and plaster molds for making airplane parts. “For my 30th birthday all I really wanted to do was drive out of the city to some place that still has good thrift stores and spend the whole day thrift shopping, because that’s what I associate with youth. I mean, we are powerless in the face of getting older, so my smallest consolations are picking and writing —these acts of pretending at choice, deciding the words and things, and then arranging them.”
“Slip-covered Matthias Kaiser vase and Joey Watson zigzag straw from the Sight Unseen OFFSITE ceramics pop-up I curated in May that came home with me, a faceted Jonathan Cross piece he gave me two years ago in the best way, just pressed into my hand without saying anything, and a bronze bowl by Alma Allen that worked. I also collect molded plastic scenery, not obsessively or anything.”
“My best friend Casey and I have tattoos of the smaller rock; he needed to cover up an old tattoo that was supposed to say ‘folly of youth’ in Sanskrit or something like that, but maybe just said ‘dumb kid,’ I’ll never know. Anyway, the next thing I know I’m getting a matching rock tattoo with him. And then even though she hadn’t seen me nearly naked enough at that point to know it was there, my friend Nancy bought the other one for me at an industrial foam warehouse; somehow a fake rock made of foam made her think of me.”
“Bailer shell necklace that can also be used to scoop water out of canoes. I like things that don’t have a very well-articulated purpose, some sort of loosely defined shape waiting for a use.”
The yellow sandals are from Creatures of Comfort, and the fuzzy ones from the first Sunday flea market at Pasadena City College, two of Wu’s favorite places to shop.
The photo is of “my knobby knees and Lake Michigan.” The Cord Lamp is by Brendan Ravenhill.
“Last year was my first trip to Mexico City, and Joanna Williams of Kneeland Co. gave me the best tip-sheet, like a store that sells dollhouse miniatures, including these melting lapdogs that made me think of Francis Bacon.”
“I found these at a thrift store when I first moved to L.A. and used them in the set-up for the pop-up I did at Creatures of Comfort. They’re heavy cast concrete.”
A caftan embroidered on a backing of old cement sacks.
“The barbershop where I get my hair cut is sort of outlandishly macho, like, I can catch up on reading basketball magazines and then at the end of the cut they’ll wrap a power sander in an old towel and use it to give you a back massage.” The dress is by Rowena Sartin — “I’ve been living in Kristin’s designs lately” — and the teacup is Kazakes Ceramics.
A pair of lamps by Doug Johnston and an old 1930s radio sign found in Sacramento. “Somehow the added ‘the’ — not ‘ON AIR’ but ‘ON THE AIR’ — seems really important to me, like the air is a tangible thing and not just our reliance on the idea of nothingness when we are unable to be more precise about what’s there.”
Vintage Comme des Garcons shirt from Chatuchak Market in Bangkok. “I wrote my college thesis on failure, and I love Rei Kawakubo’s absolute genius at making things that refuse a certain set of rules, that are unflattering. But then there’s also failure as a counter to intention, the whole setting out to achieve something and going for it. And the only thing we don’t set out to do is fail; it’s the only thing for which we don’t try. I probably shouldn’t have bothered turning in any thesis at all.”
Handwoven dress by Jess Feury from Scout.
“It used to be only warehouses, an indoor pistol range and this building on the street, but a few months ago they opened a climbing gym and a restaurant that serves delicious Northern Italian food, and I just got a notice about a public hearing for a bar downstairs. I’ve never minded noise, even shopping carts at dawn; I like being alone in company. But this is L.A., and I need to be able to park.”
For all of the handwringing about art being inaccessible, there’s no city planning theory that has gained more traction in this century than the idea of creative people driving neighborhood revitalization. Which means that the descriptively titled “Arts ReSTORE: LA” project isn’t just loftily ambitious. The month-long residency program, which began last week, might actually work at creating a less sterile West Los Angeles, not least because it is supported by the powerhouse Hammer Museum, whose three-story compound anchors one end of the street. On a stretch of Westwood Ave., better known for chain sandwich shops and fluorescent interiors, the Hammer offered a half-dozen empty storefronts to local artists and makers, with the idea that even a temporary infusion would upend the retail mood of the area. If the packed opening night was any indication, this time the theory holds. Here’s what we saw.
To know a ceramicist is to see their test pieces, and Bari Ziperstein has the kind of overflowing studio that doesn’t happen in a minute, that comes from years of private experiments and the hard work of learning not to care so much. “I think of these pieces as sculptural doodles,” she says, referring to a series of small, accidental ceramic sculptures. “They’re such a discrepancy from how I usually work, something no more than two inches. It’s really free and immediate.”
For most of us, stores are merely the fleeting destinations wherein we acquire our possessions, while homes are the more permanent spaces where we keep and lovingly display them. But for Jill Wenger, it’s the other way around: Ever since she moved to Seattle in 2001 and founded the cult boutique Totokaelo at just 26 years old, her store has been her material and spiritual base, while her living situation has remained mercurial. “I love change and generally don’t stay in any apartment or home longer than a year,” says the Texas native. Even as we interviewed her for this piece — which contains the first-ever published photos of one of her domestic interiors — she already had one foot out the door. Despite initially falling in love last May with her current apartment for its location — in Capitol Hill, three minutes away from Totokaelo — as well as its original hardwood floors and leaded-glass doors, Wenger is in the midst of searching for something new.
