Close Encounters
The four stages of Santa:
You believe in Santa.
You don’t believe in Santa.
You are Santa.
You look like Santa.*
My favorite memory of Santa takes place in November at a Wendy’s in Virginia Beach, VA. My father drove all the way out to Norfolk to pick me up at school with my little sister Patsy who was five at the time. It was dark out and he needed to feed us dinner fast, so he took us to Wendy’s. A large man in a red suit with a white beard was in the dining area polishing off a bacon cheddar cheese burger and baked potato drowning in velveeta and broccoli. When he finished his meal, he snapped his candy cane suspenders on his stained undershirt and slung his red fur trimmed coat over his shoulder. He must have noticed my fbi stare and Patsy’s uncontainable excitement as she squirmed in her seat and frequently whipped around to catch a glimpse of you know who. As he got up to bus his trash, he stopped by our table, winked at Patsy and handed her a red business card that said: Santa: North Pole. Like a frenzied maenad, Patsy got up and sniffed the seat where the man was sitting. She returned to the table proudly declaring, “Now I will always remember the true smell of Christmas!”
Wells Chandler
Originally written for Hos in this House at Soloway in Brooklyn, NY. Published in the exhibition catalog for Christmas in July at NADA East Broadway in 2024.
*Dad joke origin unknown.
Lizzie B and the Pips
Elizabeth Bonaventura, “Title unknown” (2018) caesin on paperr 22.5 x 31 inches
We are sitting at Angela and Lizzie’s kitchen table. Lizzie is djing. We are having our post-Coyacon dance party. Lizzie pops open a bottle of Mary Temple’s homemade kombucha. The fermentation causes it to explode all over the ceiling. We all pause from dancing like children caught doing something forbidden and laugh hysterically. Lizzie swings back a big gulp of Saint Mary’s cure-all-elixir and passes the bottle. George Michael, Gladys Knight and Elton John set the tone for the evening. It is Tuesday night and it is our turn to keep an eye on Lizzie while Angela warps young minds at RISD. A ConEdison salesman knocks on the front door and persuasively tries to sell Lizzie an upgrade that she does not need. I tell him to take this address off his list and to never return to the residence ever again. Manal, Lizzie and I take Larry on a walk. Lizzie knows the way. Neighbors say hello to her with concern in their eyes. Her smile is broad as we walk through the night.
Martin Ramirez, Bob Thompson and Bill Traylor were Lizzie’s three favorite artists. They also happen to be important to me as well. The visionary work of these neurodivergent artists have a prelinguistic symbolic clarity that Lizzie always wished to harness in her own practice. Simultaneously the weight of canonical mastery loomed large for her. Drawing seemed to be a way in.
I remember sitting on a bench next to Lizzie, flower pots cradling our seat outside of a group show at 106 Green. In her stealth way, Lizzie coyly asked me if I had seen anything that I liked in there. I whipped out my phone and showed her a pared down drawing of an eskimo kayaking, “I really liked this drawing.” I was not aware that Lizzie was one of the artists in the show and that the drawing was in fact hers. There was an unencumbered immediacy in the way she drew that resonated with the late stage paintings. I wish I could have seen her paint, but I did get to see Lizzie draw upon numerous occasions at one of Angela’s post meal collaborative drawing dinner parties. I was always in awe of how Lizzie could skew the learned scribbles of Angela Dufresne, Geoff Chadsey and Nicola Tyson and the less skilled marks of myself, Manal Abu-Shaheen and Cash Ragona into a distinct interior world of her own.
There is something haunting about Lizzie’s playlist that felt so integral to the direct emotive quality of the prolific output of paintings that she made at the creative height of her decline. Often our dance parties turned into karaoke or Lizzie straight up belting out the lyrics in the most empathetically sincere way from the inner chambers of her heart. Through music and painting it felt like she was trying to make contact. I am still here. I appreciate you being here with me. “Don’t let the sun go down on me.”
-Wells Chandler
Originally written for Elizabeth Bonaventura’s Fall 2023 exhibition, If we change the way we look at things, do the things we look at change? at The Gallery at Heimbold Visual Arts Center, Sarah Lawrence College