OK, I really am great, big hypocrite, sitting here trying to tell you to get rid of your lawn.  Not that I have one myself, of course -- I'm not that much of a hypocrite!  But I do recall frolicking on the lawn in the back yard of my house when I was a little girl, playing kickball with neighborhood kids.  How could I ask anyone to deprive deprive their child of that?

Well, then, let me rephrase that first sentence: Keep the parts of your lawn that are actually enjoyed.  Turn the rest into a combination mini-meadow, woodland, cactus farm, sculpture garden, pond, meditation area, patio, outdoor dining room, whatever.  Yes, you love looking at that flat expanse of green, but how much more will you love looking at a real landscape of varying hues and heights, paths weaving in and out, birds twittering, critters crittering...? 

Lawns are a fashion long overdue to fall out of favor.  They began in England as an exercise in waste (of labor, of land) and so they largely remain.  In the drier parts of the U.S., lawns are particularly hard to justify, as they waste water as well.  When I was in the Southwest 2 years ago, I admired the many surreal displays of cactuses and succulents in the gardens of Santa Fe, but, alas, in Phoenix and LA lawn-worship continues in full-swing. 

Enough nagging!  Here are a couple of websites that will help you get started in strangling, er, shrinking your lawn:
    http://www.lesslawn.com/
    http://www.foodnotlawns.com/

Why Flor Garduño?

Flor Garduño was born in 1957, just a few years before me; is also a woman; is also not white.  But that’s not why I chose her.  It’s simply this: Her photograph of a woman lying on a mat next to a couple of  iguanas, neatly bound with twine, has haunted me for well over a decade.  When her collection, Witnesses of Time, came out and launched her career into the stratosphere, her work came to my attention.  I wanted to buy that particular photo as soon as I saw it, despite the $1000+ price tag at a gallery in San Francisco.  My boyfriend at the time discouraged me.

It's called "Mujer Que Sueña" (Woman Dreaming).  That's what got me first: it's not called Woman Sleeping, which is probably what I would have called it.  How does the photographer know the woman is dreaming?  And what could she be dreaming?  Did she dream the iguanas into being? 
Did she dream us into being?
Garduño's photos can do that to us: the subjects in the frame are so immediate, so primal, that they may very well be more real we, the mute observers.  Never mind the absence of color!  Garduño makes us forget color, or dismiss it as a cheap animator's trick.  Are the iguanas (the mask/ the bird's skull/ the lush, tropical vegetation) “exotic”?  Hardly!  Every element of her compositions feels essential and natural, immune to the choices that assail us at every turn.  Así es, so it is, so it must be.
Back to the dreaming woman: Where is she?  The light sources are hard to place in many of Garduño's photographs, making it hard to place them in what we think of as our world.  Where, we ask, is the sun?  This, I think, is on purpose.  The artist is offering us a glimpse of somewhere we cannot reach simply by getting on a plane.
I love the lack of voyeurism in Garduño's work.  Her respect for her subjects is clear and uncomplicated; they are not “weird”, they are not there for our entertainment, but only for us to marvel at.  If we shake our heads, it is only to wonder why we ourselves are not so astonishing.
……………………………………………………………
I think I'm going back to that gallery, with my checkbook.