12x12 light umber rame - I hand-painted this frame. There are a lot of layers of paint on it and it is sealed, so there are some inconsistencies in the texture and color of this frame, FYI. Acrylic/ Canvas/ Bronze Leaf/Gold Leaf/ Glitter
It’s the iron oxide that makes the rocks as red as they are. I didn’t know that at the time. At the time it was 2010. I was living in Las Vegas alone. I didn’t know a soul. I was trying to stay clean and going to NA meetings, feeling completely disconnected and crazy. This woman, Shelli, invited me to a BBQ at her house. I couldn’t fathom a more strange thing.
I had no money but said I would bring something. So I obsessed all week about how to steal a bag of chips from food for less. For me moving across the country had this way of me laying on the couch ten feet away from the inground pool and palm trees. I thought would save me from who I was so I could become my ideal for the six months leading up to moving. But once I got there, I was so homesick I couldn’t make it to the pool, to the sun. To the ideal.
I went to that bbq anyway. In July. In Las Vegas. In a floor length black skirt and three scarves because I dressed like an Olsen twin for years to hide my body to feel safe. I was terrified in that normal, sunny setting surrounded by people I didn’t know. But they didn’t treat me like they didn’t know me. It was so overwhelming. I lied and said I forgot the chips. There were ten bags anyway.
It’s funny to think back to tha day and the first impressions I had of so many people that will become my main support and family in Las Vegas. People I still know and speak to regularly to this day. When I left Shellis house that day I got into the silence of my car and took Desert Inn as far west as it went.
Which was to Red Rock. I got out of my car at sunset to a purple sky against those bright red rocks. It will become the place I go to process everything that happens in my life in Las Vegas. Meeting people, getting and losing jobs, losing my Dad, learning to do yoga, meeting my husband literally in front of the rocks four years later. Everything. Maybe it’s the iron oxide. Maybe it’s the wide open space and the way that when there is a set point to look back on - it helps me to recognize the way it all fell so perfectly together. With the iron oxide, the rocks, and the purple sky.
