![[IMG: Luxury Loft - Thumbnail] D](luxuryloftthumb.jpeg)
I am the woman left behind to tell the stories.
My art studio is in a building being redeveloped into phony "live/work lofts." As each artist is pushed out of the building, they usually leave something behind. This baby doll was left behind by the art co-op in the former #14, now subdivided into numbers 18 through 23. I made the sculpture, Luxury Loft, to tell their story. The baby doll's head was crushed when I found it, but it seemed appropriate to show the damage caused when artists get stepped on by powerful landlords.
#14 was a wonderful, amazing, community of artists, who hosted the now-famous One-Minute Art Show, taking its name from the fact that it literally lasted one minute but presented many works at once, tantalizing the hundreds of viewers gathered for the show with the need to choose which artifact to study from among the many offerings. It was a startling encapsulation of the whole process of creating art, one moment condensed out of a continuous process, one instance of a world of possibilities.
The cramped and sterile "live/work lofts" that remained behind once the subdivision of spacious creative space was complete still retain the faint memory of the greatness that infused this place beneath the open beams and rafters of the now compartmentalized, standardized, and domesticated cubicles that remain, but only if you know how to look. The art and the artists were here for just a single bright moment, but the paradoxical image lingers on the retina, overlaying what is with what went before.