Kim Manfredi lends perspective with ‘A Flag Walk for Our Future’
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Laguna Art Museum’s 14th annual Art and Nature program kicked off Thursday with an invitation to participate in a mindfulness exercise.
Dozens stepped inside the Steele Gallery, where commissioned artist Kim Manfredi read Wisława Szymborska’s “View with a Grain of Sand.”
The poem, which looks at human desire to assign meaning to and view subjects and moments through our own perspective, provided the inspiration for a series of paintings by the Palm Springs-based artist.
“I actually bought the book, ‘View with a Grain of Sand,’ in 1996, the year [Szymborska] won the Nobel Prize [in Literature] for that collection of poems,” Manfredi said. “I have been reading that poem since 1996, and I still find it challenging. Not only challenging, but enlivening, because of her keen intellect, because she uses irony and satire, and yet, she also, I think, has compassion and a kind of kindness, but she’s very firm with us, and I think that’s important in a mindfulness practice.”
Manfredi’s indoor exhibit, a series of paintings by the same name as the poem, represents her take on Laguna Beach while employing those principles, chiefly constant change, impermanence, and varying perspectives.
Before leaving the gallery, Manfredi asked the crowd to practice viewing subjects from different perspectives — from the whole of the gallery, to a singular painting, to a fine detail within a piece.
Having completed the exercise, Manfredi led the audience in a walking tour of her outdoor installation, “A Flag Walk for Our Future.”
Along a 0.7-mile accessible stretch — from the lawn of Main Beach Park, through Heisler Park, and ending at Divers Cove — are four sites with flags, which take printed segments of the works inside the museum, combined with gilded edges and hand-painted elements.
“The paintings came first, so when I proposed the outdoor ‘Flag Walk for Our Future,’ I came and I did a little self-directed residency here for several weeks, where I walked and experienced 24 hours a day in Laguna,” Manfredi said. “I made the paintings in response to that, and then the flags are one time, again, removed from the paintings, in that it’s a detail of the painting printed on the flag, and then the flags are hand-painted.
“Rather than presenting nature as I perceive it in the paintings, the flags take the viewer outside to become part of the painting, where the flags are, so nature becomes the art, as well as the art.”
Each station, all within view of the Pacific Ocean, represents a different time of day: dawn, day, dusk and night.
“The idea was to address the light at the time of day, so the silvery reflection of the water at night is portrayed on the spines of these flags,” said Manfredi, while standing in front of the installation at Divers Cove — the “night” site at the end of the tour. “Whereas day, it’s that glitter of gold. I have copper, as well, that I used. The colors are from the landscape, and the imagery is from the painting, which comes from the experience of the landscape.
“Artists, they make their own worlds, and we invent our worlds with each and every series of paintings, and so that’s how I kind of [created] my world was by reopening it with the flags.”
Manfredi will lead walking tours from Laguna Art Museum through “A Flag Walk for Our Future” daily from 10 to 11 a.m. through Monday.
