memory
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The first time that Jim came out to visit me in the desert he took a greyhound bus to Banning where I picked him up. He brought a suitcase with a bunch of silver leaf and art supplies and costumes. When I would go to work in my studio he would go out and collect rocks and cover them with silver and then put them back in the landscape. (There are still a few on the hill behind my house – though a few years ago my son Emmett found one of these and brought it back in the house. Later he was playing with it and accidentally flung it through one of the glass doors, shattering it). When we asked Jim to participate in HDTS he came out and gold leafed some larger rocks and reinstalled them amongst the boulders on the HDTS parcel “Behind the Bail Bonds” – the rocks lasted a few years before someone stole them.
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When we were working on the HDTS archive exhibition in 2017, I overheard Andrea and Tatiana talking about Jim Drain’s Gold Nugget project and the fact that no one knew where the nuggets had ended up after all these years. I had just started working for HDTS a year earlier and didn’t think I could be of much help with identifying remnants of past HDTS projects, but then I remembered the gold rock in the next room that was being used as a bathroom door stop. Turned out it was one of the original gold nuggets! I think it had become one of those things that we were so accustomed to living with that it became nearly invisible, which rather than diminishing its value or importance actually increased it, especially in a space as particularly well-considered as Andrea’s studio.