I've been looking forward to the Memorial Day holiday today so that I could drive around and visit all five sites in the SFMOMA Revelatory Landscapes exhibition. I could not have asked for a more beautiful day (breezy and plenty of sun), and I miraculously avoided all traffic as well. I had been considering the possibility of taking public transportation to each of the sites, thereby further immersing myself in the whole landscape experience. However, when I really thought about how long that would take, I happily gave in to the temptation to use my car. As a side note, not once did I see another person looking at the art. I welcomed the solitude. Even though there were certainly other people around, not to mention the general din created by Bay Area Life, I felt like I could concentrate and think my own thoughts.

I started out in Berkeley near the Amtrak stop by Xanadu restaurant to see Tom Leader Studio's Coastlines. Through a mile and a half walk that took me all the way down to the Berkeley Marina and back, I found four double lines of black vinyl screen, all running vaguely parallel to each other. The space between the screens had been filled with a variety of different substances reflecting the landscape around the installation, everything from mulch and wood chips to a spare tire. After walking for a while I was able to move my gaze up from the screens to take in the water, the hills, the ground squirrels leaping through the dry grass. Then I remembered I'd left my purse in plain view in the front seat of my car in a deserted Berkeley parking lot, and suddenly it just seemed a really long walk back to the starting point. And me with no sunscreen on.

Next stop was West Oakland for Hood Design's Landscape in Blue—Entropy in the Landscape. This project was supposed to reveal the vibrant jazz and blues scene that once existed in a particular three-block area before buildings were removed to make room for a postal distribution center. If anything, the difficulty I had imagining such a community there speaks to how irretrievable the loss of space can be. I kept listening for the jazz that was supposed to be coming out of speakers installed around the area, but all I could hear were the BART trains crashing by overhead. Long mirrors hung on the columns that support the train tracks in an attempt to disguise them, but I caught a glimpse of myself in them and just thought a lone white girl in this area looked pretty out of place too. I liked the benches on one of the street corners though, made out of a variety of materials and twisted into differing shapes. Those gave me more of a sense of history than walking through the neighborhood did.

I trekked all the way to downtown San Jose for the third site, Markings by Hargreaves Associates. Located under a freeway overpass just a few blocks from the San Jose Convention Center, the designers had painted the freeway supports on either side of a slice of blue sky with Native American words matched with their English meanings. I wandered around in the dirt below these great silver concrete columns, not really trying to absorb any deeper meaning these words might hold and feeling kind of sheepish because it was obvious some homeless people had taken refuge around the borders of this space. I felt like I was intruding again. But I took to heart the idea of stopping to explore a patch of earth I'd driven past dozens of times without even the merest of thoughts and of trying to assign to it some of the importance it once had. I try to be mindful of my city and its history as I walk around in it as well.

Now it was all the way up to Candlestick Point near San Francisco for Kathryn Gustafson's Wind, Sound, and Movement. This was my favorite piece. It contained a very simple idea, but it was beautifully executed. The parking lot my directions pointed me to was chained off, so I parked elsewhere and hiked back. But hrm, the now-familiar exhibition kiosk appeared to be behind a chain link fence secured with a padlock. I strained my eyes up the hill to find any sign of the installation or even a path, but I didn't really see anything that looked hopeful. There were definite signs that the area was a busy construction site during the normal work week, maybe they had dismantled the art piece? I was about to turn around to leave when I reconsidered and ducked through a hole in the fence. Not a soul around. I noticed an arrow pointing to what could be considered a path and started to follow it. Another arrow. Was I on the right track? A sudden tinkling of wind chimes from the shubbery above my head brought a sigh of relief out of me. I must be on the right track. Sure enough, ahead of me I could see rainbow glints from hundreds of spinners placed along the trail. It's hard to describe how beautiful a sight they were as I huffed and puffed up the last steep hill and found a plateau filled with wind, pampas grass, and rainbow light. I took a seat in one of the chairs set against the edge of the cliff and found that the corrugated metal that formed the back of the chair almost completely shut out the roar of the highway below. Now there was only the wind. I felt enclosed in beauty, and I sang a little song of gratitude. I couldn't believe I had it all to myself. My aching feet and a niggling worry about trespassing kept me from following the spinners any farther along the path, but down below me where a large gravel pit had been laid out in preparation for more construction, I could see little animal totems guarding the hillside.

I did not stop at the last of the installations, Red Is Out by ADOBE LA in the Mission Bay area of San Francisco proper. There was a ball game at Pac Bell Park that was bollocksing up parking, and I was too tired to persevere. As I drove by I saw a bunch of red blobs on the ground that looked mildly interesting and perhaps worthy of investigation. Maybe I'll walk down and take a look as a break during my workday sometime soon.

Revelatory Landscapes