The Dariad, 2014
for Dare Turner

The Dariad began at the Bernal Heights Farmers Market in San Francisco. Dare Turner, who went every Saturday to the market, made her usual circuit with Abraham Burickson. At the end of the her ordinary route, however, the woman who usually sold her apples handed her a greek coin with a picture of Odysseus’s ship on it. Her Odyssey was beginning; she looked around and saw a pink blur in the distance—the blur accelerated and then it was upon her—her closest friends, all wearing pink onesies. She had entered into the realm of the absurd.

The next few hours would see her approaching the forms of her life in strange and oblique ways. She would find herself walking through the Mission district, focusing on images of fire, then entering into a friend’s house where a noir-ish poker game was taking place. All through the day, certain images recurred—fire, faces, frames. She visited a house where a woman had fled a conflagration while carrying her newborn, she wore a necklace of matches, and she touched the faces of her friends and lovers. Eventually, Dare found herself in the woods of Golden Gate Park, where frames floated in the air and she took the landscape in like a series of photographs.

These three recurrent images returned at the climactic scene at the DeYoung Museum in Golden Gate Park.

Dare is a woman who spends long periods of time with art and usually goes to museums to spend 30-45 minutes with a single piece of art. This is not how most people engage with museums, so she is usually the odd woman out in such institutions. When she arrived at the DeYoung that day, however, she met a tour group let by a museum guide who led her group through the building at Dare’s tempo. The group looked at three pieces of art—a face, a framed landscape, and an installation made from the remains of a church destroyed by arson. At the first piece, the group spent five minutes, at the second, fifteen minutes, and at the third, thirty. The forty or so members of the group disrupted the rhythm of the museum, and brought to it a meditative attentiveness.

To hear more about The Dariad, listen to the Studio 360 Podcast.

Locations

San Francisco: An abandoned rose garden, various private residences in San Francisco, a burned-down building in the Mission District, the woods of Golden Gate Park; Santa Cruz: the woods near Santa Cruz, CA. Public Scene: the DeYoung Museum.

Credits