April Durham

April Durham is a visual artist and writer. She breaks boundaries between/among conventional media by making films that look like drawings and writing essays as prose poems. Unfolding complex structures by drawing anthropomorphized animals and birds who float above crop circles and through globular clusters, or writing about bootlegging grandmothers as though they were Saxon heros, her work is modeled on the overlapping arrangement of a fugue, where multiple voices speak as through a type of malfunctioning harmonium. Accumulation of information is presented with subtle demand for deciphering that is both intense and absurdly humorous.

Her recent solo show, Self Created Chameleon on the Hot Seat, featured new drawings and the book, Common Objects, a collaboration with French photographer, Olive Martin, is available from Beyond Baroque Books on amazon.com.

April holds an MFA from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena (1999) and spent two years in France thanks to a grant from the city of Nantes and the École des Beaux Arts de Nantes.

Current Exhibitions

Paper Dolls at Division 9 Gallery Feb 7 to 27 . Opens 2/7 6-9 pm . 3850 Lemon St. Riverside .

29/92 at Maloof Foundation for the Arts . Opens 2/10 3-5 pm . through March 23. www.malooffoundation.org

Of Intricacy. Eagle Rock Center for the Arts . March 22 to April 26 . Opening reception April 5, 7-10 pm. www.centerartseaglerock.org

Multipoint US Artists . 2007-08

Little Known Facts: The Eulogy (excerpt 2006)

Louis Armstrong’s 16 year-old mother sometimes worked as a prostitute. As a little kid you realize something is wrong.

I once knew a man whose face and neck were covered in boils. Great seeping things that changed form each time we saw him. My sister would count them while he ate his chops and mash at our long table. She was discrete, never using her fingers to keep track, so I don’t think he noticed. His mother had been a prostitute but only after his father was killed in a fire leaving no pension and a large mortgage on their dried out farm. She sold the farm and bought a small apartment in town, but soon found she didn’t have money to buy food or pay for heat and no skills for working, not even as a baker’s assistant. Maybe enough training was offered from the social services bureau but she was a trifle lazy and chose instead to do something she already knew well from being married.

As a small boy, the man with boils watched all sorts of men walk though the lobby of the apartment building into his mother’s rooms and out again a little later adjusting their belts and patting their pockets for a wallet or billfold. Sometimes several men waited in the lobby where the boy read his book about fly fishing or played solitaire with tarot cards. They never looked at each other but maintained a stern profile gazing out the window into the broken, frozen garden. As the men waited, the boy read an article in National Geographic about a French researcher who lived in a cave 100 meters underground for months and months. Isolated but connected by electric wires, the man went slowly mad and wrote about elaborate suicides by suffocation using a phosphorus lamp.

The boy developed the boils when he was eight. The hinges of his jaws ached when he moved them; so he stayed mostly silent and ate just enough to keep his mother from complaining. As an adult, he liked my mother’s chops as they were quite tender and he would eat his dinner, the same food each night, at the inn belonging to my parents. I was about 12 he saw me arranging my evening tips into piles at the end of the bar and he asked for a loan. I gave him what I had and then he left. Recently, not more than two weeks ago, my mother forwarded a letter he had sent to the inn, now under new management. The letter said that he was sorry it had taken him so long to repay the loan but here it was with a small amount of interest and he was glad because he no longer had the boils.

My wife pretends to dislike chili peppers but I have caught her eating them directly from the jar. Bulbous red pickled bonnets from the Italian market. Great spoonfuls of spicy chutney peas and mango. She dislikes kissing me after her chili binges but this is fine by me as she has terrible breath most of the time.