Open for submissions! Hotel guests, general public and digital visitors to this website are welcome to submit.
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*****
6/28/24
I found the line drawings to be elegant, both delicate and strong. There was a flow to the lines, a flow out of the woman which came images of man. My first impression was that this represented a woman who gives birth to all mankind.
On further inspection I recognized the images as balloons containing the drawings of man. To me that seemed like it is woman who gives birth to her creation, which is man, detaches from her and floats away to be part of the universe.
*****
6/26/24
The figure stands between the space of here and the space of somewhere else. Not in the shower, not out of the shower. She is between here and elsewhere.
This room is the space between home and away as she transitions from where she’s been to where she’s going next. She has shaken off the past and has filled yellow balloons with it. Those with the painful memories she will burst, and those with sweet memories she will float aloft to catch and release as she wishes. But in this moment of pause here she stands tall with confidence in her decision to come to this portal and move on. Does she know the travelers in each of the rooms along the corridor and passing between their here and their elsewhere ?
Submitted via text during the in-suite Artist Talk.
*****
6/24/24
Hidden Memories/Parts
Sarah had a husband, kids, and friends. She had lived a full life, despite only being in her early 30s.
While visiting Healdsburg on a vacation away from her usual life, she settled into her hotel to take a shower. It had been a long day of travel, and exploration, and her feet hurt.
After undressing and turning the shower as hot as it could go, she entered. Once the water began to pour over her head, she was flooded with memories, thoughts, and finally felt she could relax. She started to compartmentalize and let go of concerns, her job, packing school lunches, and her mundane life at home.
After dressing, she walked down to the hotel bar and ordered a drink. Finally feeling relaxed and at peace. Within a few minutes a man approached.
He began with small chit chat, but was clearly interested in Sarah. Before she could get a word out, a balloon with a face containing a fake smile appeared.
The man saw the balloon and realized she wasn’t interested. She was on vacation, finally able to fully relax.
*****
6/17/24
The men I met in my twenties, like balloons, appeared out of nowhere--floating into my life, an impermanent diversion. I followed them to new places, enjoyed their company, had many adventures, before they floated on, and popped out of my life.
Matt was one of them. I met him while interning for a political candidate, and went with him to Europe after graduation. He looked and sang just like Harry Connick Jr., and he made me laugh in four languages. Once, when I was visiting from the States, we splurged on a trip from his graduate school dorm room, to Italy. We took a train, then a boat to a modest, minimalist hotel on Isola d'Elba. We rode scooters around the island, swam in the Mediterranean, and ate caprese sandwiches on the warm beach. The view from the room was incredible--white stone walls and nothing but water as far as you could see. It was romantic as hell, but I felt sick on the third night, after our seafood dinner (and the news that Matt had fathered a child with another woman while I was in the States.) Pop!
Josh and I met at a New Year's Eve party through friends. He was a lobbyist (the only occupation, in my opinion, with a reputation worse than a lawyer), but I gave him a chance anyway. He was super smart, had a great group of friends, and loved to travel. He once took me to Vegas for my birthday (admittedly, not my first destination choice), and we stayed in a glitzy, over-the-top hotel room, spent the day at the spa, ate steak dinners and drank expensive wine. The next Christmas, when we were house shopping, I caught Josh and the pretty local TV newscaster, kissing on his front porch. Pop!
I met Jake in Tulum, Mexico. He was a traveling nurse from the UK living only 30 minutes from me in California, and we both were traveling solo and staying in the same quaint, modern boutique hotel on the beach. We spent the whole week together, renting bicycles, hiking pyramids, touring Mayan ruins, swimming in cenotes. Our last night, we stayed up all night talking until the sun came up. In the morning, he picked a fresh coconut and opened it up with his Swiss Army knife and we drank fresh coconut water under the coconut tree, while we waited for the hotel restaurant to open. For breakfast, we dined al fresco on egg white omelettes with spinach and feta, and drank fresh papaya juice. During breakfast he got a call that he got the new assignment in Florida. We promised to stay in touch, but he met his (now wife) on the plane to Florida. Pop!
The men I dated in my twenties and thirties-- I never did see any of them again. Their memories, are impermanent, like faces drawn on balloons-- silently bobbing and floating, fleeting and fading away in my memory. But the spaces and places, I can still picture, decades later and remember each delicious meal, breathtaking view, and new adventure. These spaces and places are the keepers of my memories, and of those who came before and after me. A place where all of our stories interwine and intersect, as we float in and out, and on to our next adventure.
6/13/24
She carried the decapitated heads because the hotel staff apparently were against streaking. To be exact, it turns out, she was streaking “for too long”. Maybe a little shorter streak and the staff would still have their heads. But she would not take “no streaking” for an answer to her streaking. That was the short and long of it. Off with their heads!
How did she do it you might ask. She used a machete from the antique shop next door. She streaked next door and grabbed it while they were running after her. She actually decapitated them in the bus stop in front of the hotel. Witnesses to the crime sided with her and thought she should be more often naked and/or longer. They cheered when the heads rolled.
However the police came and locked her up in Santa Rosa. The witnesses collected funds and donations and applied for a grant to memorialize her statement of nudity and commissioned this art project. Memories be dammed.
Family-authored from a remote location in two twenty minute sessions.
6/13/24
It might have been the last time they shared a beautiful hotel room together and she knew that this story would not last. It was hard to be so sad in such a beautiful place, but as the man she had met and fallen madly in love with snored next to her, she thought of another and the time they too had shared a hotel room and it felt very different. She thought perhaps a shower would help shake off these memories. As she showered she breathed the smell of lemon and sage from the hotel soap. She wanted the memories to wash away, but she couldn't, she'd carry them with her forever. She wrapped herself in the cozy hotel robe, she poured herself a glass of local Syrah, lit up a cigarette even though she knew she'd get charged and savored the memories of the past.
Written in 15 minutes 35 seconds.
6/12/2024
Despite the futility of the endeavor, Kendra persisted. Line by line she rebuilt the faces of each man whose name she had bore. Some she shared genes with, some she’d f&cked (another word for married), some had come out of her vagina. There were 6 of them. A biological father, a stepfather, a first husband, a second husband and one son. Should she include her brothers? They shared a name. But she did not bear their name. Same with uncles and grandfathers. Should she strike her son from the line up? She didn’t bear his name, he bore hers, or rather he bore his father’s. She was trying to remember their faces 🙂 for the ritual tonight.
Tonight was a name reclaiming ceremony, the culmination of a journey of self discovery. Rediscovery, she corrected herself. The radio threw at her a godsend type message, the Bonnie Raitt version: “Named after my mother, my old man is another ... Lightning was desire … this old house would have burnt down a long time ago … make me an angel that flies from Montgomery … and come home in the evening and have nothing to say!”
Named after her mother. She bore as her middle name her mother’s maiden name, which was her grandfather’s name. She had given each of her kids middles that were their grandmother’s maidens. That was a very waspy tradition, and it did not capture the intent of this procedure. Each face she pulled out of her head. They looked like any faces because stereotypes obscured the specificity of their attributes and even though she could picture their uniqueness, she could not overcome the clichés once her hand began to execute them. Oh well. She would know who was who.
By the river, her heart was jumpy. Lights flickered ahead and she left the path to join them. Each face was attached to her body and she was naked. They were on glass balls that dragged behind her making 6 ruts in the ground. Wild grapevine rope rose from the advancing line of men’s faces and wrapped her waist. She might have been an alien from another planet sowing extraterrestrial 👽 seed onto the barren gravel.
Arrived. Many more women than she expected were there bearing accoutrements to shed like hers. But unlike hers. There were mud finger drawings across skin to be washed off and was that blood traces over there? There were headdresses with paper maché bobble heads springing to the drums (she held a saber, were they to be decapitated?), oh and her! The solo helium balloon floating high above that old lady, playing with the sky light, a fluorescent face in technicolor on a black balloon, eclipsing the moon on and off. Nearby, a small generator blowing air was rigged to a shopping cart that had (it must have been ten!) Air Dancers wiggling around obscenely in the dark. Their faces were all the same. Clearly she’d overthought that “representative” part of the assignment.
They formed a circle ⭕️ and each handed the woman next to her the implement of choice for releasing their last names. Kendra handed the woman next to her a large sledge hammer. She turned and took into her own hands a torch blower connected to the generator activating the air dancers. Oh yay she thought. Oh yay.
Written in 42 minutes in Suite 3