News

Johanna Fateman

Aspen Mays

The New Yorker

10/22/2018

Taping your windows does more harm than good, hurricane experts warn, yet, for many people, applying “X”s and asterisks to their homes and businesses remains a pre-storm ritual. Mays, who now lives in the Bay Area, grew up in Charleston, South Carolina, a city hit hard by Hurricane Hugo, in 1989, when she was a child, and she now finds a muse in the useless, protective gesture. Memories and mass-media imagery of the storm’s aftermath blur together in her eerie, big photograms, made by enlarging newspaper photos and then replicating, by hand, the taped starburst forms. The dramatic black-and-white suite on view here features the dark arched windows and brick façade of a restaurant named, almost too perfectly, California Dreaming.