Judy Among the Forsythia

King County, Washington Bus Stop Panorama

The City Panorama Project began in 2010 when King County Metro, WA partnered

with PCNW to expand the public art scene in Seattle and other cities in King County.

As a way to incorporate art into everyday life,

to beautify Seattle and other cities served by Metro,

and to make new perspectives and ideas available to all,

the City Panorama Project seeks photographic artwork that will accomplish

these objectives while increasing the visibility of the photographic arts.

Over 550 photo murals have been installed since the launch of this public art project in 2010.

This annual project is now on its seventh year and was funded

through a 4Culture grant between 2010-2015.

King County Bus shelter Videos

showing Judy Among the Wisteria

General Video about the program:

http://www.kingcounty.gov/metro/murals

Specific Video about the construction:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4ktxrZBQMQ&feature=youtu.be

You can see Z's bus shelter image a couple of times in the above video

 at the timing:  2:32-36 and 2:49-51

The King County Panorama project included an image entitled Judy among the Forsythia.

This image is a token about my my relationship with my sister. The emotions are not necessarily seen within the image but the energy I brought to bear in creating it uses that emotional engine.

The story of the Forsythia is about as timely in its growing through out my first two decades in parallel as the forsythia came to this house only shortly before I arrive on the Panama Limited from El Salvador after the Pan Am flight over the Gulf. We grew together. My sister told me as a young 5 or 7 year old never to ask about our mother. The forsythia grew up in Illinois as did our mother. The forsythia provided a little cover for Judy to have this conversation protected from the kitchen window's observation as we were in the backyard out of the vector's line of sight to us north of the forsythia and our grandmother's watchful eyes peering from the south within the kitchen perhaps peering into the backyard. She, my sister, was always much more prim and proper growing up under the grandparents.

As much as this was her grist to grow up under, I was always my own self, and not impervious to the Illinois mores but always privately questioning. College provided me mates who created by asking questions of themselves and others. Observation was the keen work to make things visible. So when Judy said, don't ask as an instruction set at the age of five, six, or seven~ I obeyed.  But that only lasted a couple of decades...or perhaps three. Later I came to ask myself who was our mother, what happened to her, what was the swirl of absence that forever caused a wonder wrapped in distrust of people's words.

The distrust was not paranoia, just a super cautiousness of trust and distance from that severe loss of a missing mother. It did lead to a sad reaction on my part to keep leaving, keep looking, keep wondering. But now you see that the image has nothing to do with the words, not unlike my own emotions.

So our mother died in El Salvador; legend being food poisoning and perhaps wrong medicines being ineptly given to her during her few last hospitalized days of failing recovery. Some drama unknown to my sense of detail. But the Forsythia was pivoting in the silence it generated beyond a recoverable conversation of understanding. And sadly too, others have come into and out of my life with that 'shoosh, I don't want to talk about it' and I am still hurt that those walls are such a human trait. Let dogs lie reinforce the cliché's life has been long lived and reinforced but still has little interest to me.

This image speaks about the lovely noise of the cheery tree with some magenta light; it talks of the 1961 image of my sister with her precise posture befitting a young sixties teen becoming a woman still protecting an Eve with discreet hand occlusion and ironed dress, hair without misplacement and all the hope of a spring blooming forsythia.

 Below is the straight ahead print, 2 feet x 8 feet long.