Medium with a
message
Palomar College exhibit to feature quilted love letters, symbolic shadow boxes
By Pat Sherman
Today's Local News
Thursday, October 19, 2006
Jane LaFazio stitched a
series of 30-year-old love letters
between organza sheets to create her quilt art.
Photo courtesy of Jane LaFazio
One day while cleaning her storage shed, artist Jane LaFazio came across a dusty bundle of letters, long-ago expressions of passion and wanderlust, tied neatly with a ribbon.
As she stopped to reread the letters, which she received sporadically from 1972-75, her former life as a flight attendant came rushing back: “Are you back my global babydoll, jet-lagged with your purse filled with mini bottles and plastic forks? This is sedentary Ralph writing you from stuck-on-earth Salt Lake . . . sipping on a Miller High Life, concentrating on your gauzy, too-old image.”
“I thought, ‘Wow, these are fantastic,’” LaFazio said. “I wanted to preserve them in a weird kind of way.”
LaFazio’s wellspring was overflowing, inspiring her to turn an old love into art.
The result was two quilts: “Ralph’s Letters” and “Ralph’s Envelopes.” The works are among 15 LaFazio will display during Boehm Gallery’s upcoming exhibit, Retablos, Milagros y Marigolds. The exhibit, Oct. 28 to Nov. 17, includes the work of four artists, each loosely connected to Dia de los Muertos, the Latin Day of the Dead.
LaFazio said she and her young suitor, Ralph Lowe, slowly drifted apart.
“That’s kind of the beauty of it; (the letters) just sort of faded away,” said LaFazio, who hand-stitched Lowe’s yellowed reports from around the world between clear organza sheets.
The couple’s courtship began in Alaska, in what is now Denali National Park. Some letters are typed and some handwritten. Some were sent during Lowe’s travels through the Sahara Desert while an undergraduate at the University of Utah.
“He wanted to be a writer,” LaFazio said. “As he said it, he was getting experience.”
When LaFazio came across the letters, it had been three decades since she and Lowe last communicated. To her surprise, it took her only a cursory Web search to locate her old flame, today a Harvard graduate. He was residing in Los Olivos, near Santa Barbara, with his longtime spouse. LaFazio also is married.
After viewing an e-mailed image of LaFazio’s finished work, Lowe said he was both surprised and impressed.
“It’s kind of flattering for me,” said Lowe, who teaches high school English at a boarding school in Santa Barbara. “I think it’s an interesting homage to that time of her life.”
Lowe said the rebirth of his “transcontinental seduction” conveys a “diaphanous whimsy” that is “purely feminine.”
“You know, I was hitchhiking around Morocco with a ponytail,” he said. “We’ve all changed tremendously, but the letters don’t.”
LaFazio invited Lowe to the exhibit’s opening reception, 4:30 to 6 p.m. Oct. 28, though she said he is not sure whether he will be able to attend.
“I told him our reunion would be on ‘Oprah,’” she said. “Maybe he’ll hold out for that.”
The Boehm Gallery exhibit also will include the art of Helen Shafer Garcia, Michael deMeng and Judith Parenio. Garcia, an illustrator and watercolorist, will feature watercolor and found object altars; deMeng will showcase Pez dispenser totems and altars fashioned from old rusty objects; Parenio will show her nichos, shadow box frames inspired by Mexican and American Indian folk art.
Parenio’s mixed-media nichos are made of hand-carved wood. Some are decorated with silver and gold leaf and contain artificial flowers, skulls and other items.
One nicho is an altar to a dead raven.
“I admire how resourceful this bird is,” Parenio said of the large, jet-black creatures. “You don’t see them dead very often. They’ve managed to stay alive where other birds are very delicate. . . . They mate for life.”
Another of Parenio’s pieces was inspired by her interactions with the Huichol Indians in the coastal town of Nayarit, Mexico, near Jalisco.
“I remember this guy; he was always smoking and smiling in his ratty old suit,” Parenio said. “They say he died of smoking, but I liked him.”
Reach reporter Pat Sherman at (760) 752-6774.
