About my traffic utility box design:

“Stay Awhile”

Original Medium: Mixed media

An exceptional artist was ripped from our community’s tapestry when we suddenly lost our friend, Nathan Cordero August 15, 2018, at the age of 43. Complications during an epileptic seizure were the eventual cause of death. His epilepsy wasn’t something we really talked about but it was there, quiet in the background. It never defined him yet he happily found ways to operate within those parameters. He worked as a janitor at Sierra 2 and did a lot of house-painting. For enjoyment, he was an artist, went fishing frequently (catch-and-release only), and his most recent obsession: metal detecting. He would go out several times a week and the garage outback was soon overtaken with treasure or trash, depending who you asked. He was like Rumplestiltskin spinning straw into gold the way he could elevate the buried, the discarded, and the invisible into relevant works of art.

I once asked Nate how he got started making those wood-cut razorblade words that would later become a key element in so much of his work. He told me that when he was a teenager, he’d had a fight with his parents and got so mad he punched his bedroom door. But it was not solid. It was a cheap door—a hollow space covered by thin layers of particulate matter and veneer. His fist went right through it. Like Alice at the looking glass, he put his face up to the hole and saw the door from a new dimension, from the inside out. He picked it apart and inspected each little layer, amazing at what lay previously hidden. He probably said “Whoa!” a lot while doing it. (And what is veneer, after all? It’s a super-thin layer meant to cover imperfections. And Nate had a talent for cutting it away and exposing what lay underneath.) He was curious and generous with his curiosity. We all have work from him, whether he handed it to us with a story or left it behind somewhere for you to discover later. Nate was also a joker. Always the first to tell a poop story. It was truly one of his favorite topics. I miss his caterpillar mustache and the way he would curl it into his expression when turning his head and giving you the side-eye. I will NOT miss him jumping out of anywhere at me though... He knows that.

Dude, we miss you.

Ianna Frisby

Nate’s Website                                                                

Nate’s Spotify PLAYLIST

Tell us the story of these things

You dredge from dry earth and running streams

Turn us a yarn as you twist them

In your scarred and eager hands

Pair them with your unrelenting belief

In their imbued history

They speak to you and inspire you to infuse joy

Into the narrative you extract

You are the voice of the lost, the translator

Tell us the story of these things

Tags bearing the pedigree names of heirloom roses

Fired bullet shells

Seven grey can tabs

Two flattened dinner pans

A circular hem weight, flattened on one side

Dragged to a line by a Plymouth woman

Her spirit embodied in the metal

As it was bound up in the fabric that held in her heat

You speculate that a force in her life

Chased gold into the horizon

You pursue what was left behind

Storied iron and steel, still gold

Tell us about the times

You kept the pace of the day

Traveling by painstakingly researched aerial maps

Of forgotten foundations

In the California cities and terraced foothills

About my traffic utility box design:

“Outside the Inner Kingdom”

Original Medium: Ceramic Assemblage

The design I chose for the utility box located on the corner of 15th and I is in front of Super Pan & E Tea which serves food from Thailand, Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan and I wanted to design an image that complemented the fusion spirit of the restaurant. A few years ago, I traveled to Thailand and this provided me with the fodder to build a freestanding 8’ tall ceramic sculpture based on my memories and experiences there, titled Inner Kingdom. Similar to a cabinet of curiosities, the sculpture is embedded with wonderful objects just waiting to be discovered by the viewer. Although the design of the utility box wrap uses images of the ceramic sculpture in a flattened format, there is one panel with the entire sculpture while the others are composites of details recontextualized for maximum visual stimulation. 

About my traffic utility box design:

Original medium: Hand embroidery on canvass