* MISSION FOUNTAIN *
> cheyenne weaver >
MISSION
FOUNTAIN IN SCOTOMIAL PLUME
Contrasting the various histories and mis-stories of Southern California?s Mission
past, I propose a sculpturally strattified replica of the Mission style fountain
built in 1853 at the center of historic Rancho Camulos.
The traditional Mission style fountain is exemplary of the architecture common in early colonization by the Spanish of the American South West. The one hundred fifty-one year old Camulos fountain served as central to the domestic life of the del Valle family. Near the turn of the century, in a massive campaign of mis-information in land speculation for which Charles Fletcher Lummis would gain his fame, the Rancho was chosen as the home of the fictional Californo herione "Ramona", characterized in the selfsame titled book by Helen Hunt Jackson in 1884. This narrative was used to advertise a similarly fictionalized history, romanticizing the mission-native relationship as benign and humanitarian, for the massive emigration to Southern California. The Mission fountain of Southern California represents, consequently an aesthetic of a fictional romance rather than utility.
Traditionally placed in the courtyards of private residencies and at the end of long irrigation trenches, the mission fountain was sign of the first long-armed extensions of expansion into remote non-sustainability in Southern California. Originally the center of community life in Spanish architecture, when brought to the American West there occurred a shift from a utilitarian centeredness, to architectural corporate signage as an extended metaphor for consumption.
In parallel with this early sprawl of the Mission system, is the Southern California land boom of the late 19th century and the fast food corporatization of today, all stretching farther and farther into the desert of sustainable resources.
Constructed with materials "native" to the area, fast-food style "saltillo" tiles, pink "adobe" cement, and formed plastic, the fountain will engage an ironic tone inviting the viewers to "wash" clothes as enacting the love scene between Ramona and the Native American Alessandro. This elbow-grease will mechanically project the mechanism around on a central pivot which will be a series of devices used to distill bio-diesel from fryolater oil from fast food french fry machines. The pivot will also act as an aqueduct carrying the distilled diesel fuel to an engine in the fountain which projects the fountain 'round and 'round. Similar in form to the giant grinding cog machines rotated by the labor of a mule yoked to the end of a long protruding arm, the viewer will labor the machine as they detect the distinct smell of ?freedom? frys.
> bio >
Cheyenne engages the parallel relationships of historical research and cultural meaning of the monument to explore innate irony within the stratta. Thus often employing the materials of synthetic/symptomatic popular cultural production to deploy a shift in utility. She has graduated the California Institute of the Arts with a Bachelors of Fine Arts and is living,/working in Los Angeles.