(1968; studio installation; Venice, California)
The idea began to take shape in Alex’s darkroom, the cramped, high-ceilinged bathroom he converted at the back of his studio on Pico Boulevard. The studio was wedged between two rehearsal spaces, and on hot nights everybody left their doors open. Alex had just started experimenting with photography and liked working amid noise, at least in the early stages of a project. He and Jess talked and shared a joint and listened to their neighbors play. These were mostly bands they’d never hear from again, but every now and then a recognizable voice or chord drifted over. The 13th Floor Elevators a few times; Morrison and the Doors once for the better part of a week. Alex talked through an idea and dipped photo paper into pans, clipping the developing prints onto wires strung overhead like power lines. The only light in the room came from the painted bulb on the wall, which suffused everything in a deep, dark red. Looking at Alex’s face or at her own hands, Jess felt both the imagined heat of the color and a strange remove, as if she were looking at another version of herself, some slightly sinister iteration.
She switched out the red bulb with one she painted blue and felt the room’s temperature drop, a wintry chill. A green bulb brought her back to her childhood, a midsummer morning lying in the backyard grass behind their house in Somerville. Yellow transported her to second or third grade, kids holding buttercups beneath each other’s chins and looking for the color’s reflection on skin, irrefutable playground proof that you were in love with whichever boy or girl held the flower.
“I appreciate that you’re on to something,” Alex said. “But could you do it someplace where you don’t screw up my work?”
He was only half joking. They were on the verge of another breakup. By the time she had an idea for a new space, they hadn’t spoken in weeks.
She called Gabe and they built walls subdividing her Navy Street studio: nine rooms of equal size, ten feet by twenty, with a single doorway in the same position on each western-facing wall leading from one room to the next. They covered the windows, hung the doors, installed gelled lights into subtle recesses cut into the ceiling, flooding each slim space with a particular color: violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange, red. The first room was dark; the last was pure white, and led out through the final door, down the stairs to the street.
In the week before opening, they tested the space. Gabe was concerned about injuries. The light in the rooms overwhelmed sight, erasing boundaries and anchors to the solid world. It was difficult to find the doors, to pass from one room to the next. Jess strung a thin cord across the center of each room, waist high, that visitors could follow like a rope line. But the cord felt like a tether, grounding the experience. There was the same problem when they added a coarse-textured strip to the floor, a path to follow. This put too much emphasis on the feel of the studio, the physical structure. They were looking for a solution to a problem that was intrinsic to the work. She wanted the place to disappear.
On the day of the opening, she still didn’t have an answer. She considered calling the whole thing off. Work wasted, an idea that didn’t fully bloom. She walked down to the boardwalk for some fresh air and a burrito. Waiting for her order, she watched workers remodeling the front of the surf shop across the street. In the middle of reframing, they removed the shop’s door and then broke for lunch. Jess stared at the uncovered opening for some time, waiting for the workers to finish the job before realizing she had just finished her own.
She rushed back to her studio and removed all the doors between the rooms. When she turned on the lights, each newly opened doorway framed the glow of the next room, and as she approached each threshold the colors began to mix, creating a bridge from one pure hue to another. Gabe arrived right in time to let the first visitors in.
People called it the Rainbow Rooms or Candyland. At first this nicknaming angered her. She thought they were trivializing her work. Within a few days, though, she realized that the opposite was true. Visitors were personalizing the space. Not everyone experienced something meaningful or moving, frightening or joyous. Some strode quickly, as if through a hokey sideshow attraction, and left rolling their eyes. But others stayed longer, entering the first dark space alone and moving at their own pace, lingering in certain rooms, pausing in the doorways. A few even sat or lay down, they told her after, fully immersed in each color, feeling it on their faces, in their bodies. The colors filled their lungs, some said, touching their chests. One older woman took Jess’s hand and held it to her own flat breast as if somehow Jess could feel what she had felt, as if that touch could convey what she struggled to explain.
Jess planned to keep the studio open for a week, but word spread, and soon when she arrived in the afternoons to clean and prepare, a line had already formed. Kids from the neighborhood, surfers and musicians smoking joints on the sidewalk, but also visitors from tonier parts of the city, little old ladies from Pasadena, Wilshire Boulevard businessmen, Encino housewives, all surprised to find themselves standing around on the seedy edge of town waiting for something they had only heard about. As the days went on they returned, forming an enthusiastic little community of a line, sharing experiences while waiting for the sun to sink and Gabe to open the front door.
“A year ago, I had a stroke.”
Jess overheard the man from where she sat up on the fire escape, letting some paint touch-ups dry. He was about Jess’s age, and stood in the line down on the sidewalk, talking to a woman who carried a small boy on her hip.
“I had to quit my job, start my life again,” the man said. “My memory was screwed up, my face. My arm, as you can see. My speech. I was angry, embarrassed by how I looked and sounded. I missed my old self. But what I missed most were dreams. I stopped dreaming. My doctor said this was expected, that part of my brain was damaged, like it was burned in a fire. It wasn’t coming back. So I’d go to sleep and wake up in the morning and it was like I was dead all of those hours.”
It was a warm evening, and the man pinched his shirt collar between his fingers, pulling it away from his neck, letting some air in.
“I go to a pool a couple times a week for rehab,” he said. “A girl who works there told me about this place. So I came by last week. Maybe I thought it would give us something to talk about besides my progress in the pool. I didn’t know what I was supposed to see here. A different color in each room, so what? I thought it was bullshit, excuse my French.”
Still uncomfortable, he unfastened his top button, giving his neck more room, then lowered his hand, smoothing the front of his shirt.
“Then,” he said, “that night, I had the most vivid dream. I can’t even describe it. It was like when I was a kid. You know the dreams you had when you were a kid?”
He nodded to the boy on the woman’s hip.
“Like the dreams he probably has. You can’t even describe them, you don’t know the words. I woke up crying. I mean, I didn’t even cry in the hospital. When all those things were taken, I didn’t cry. But that dream was so bright, so real.”
Jess heard the front door unlock, and then Gabe’s voice, welcoming one of the regulars at the front of the line.
The man below looked toward the door. His body seemed a little taller now. Straighter, stronger, eager.
“I’ve come back every night since,” he said.