PETLAND: A woman's life

Installation artist Kathy Glowen first entered Mamie Rand's home in Spokane, Washington, in the spring of 1994. She felt before she was told that it was a woman's house, that no man had ever lived there. Mamie had lived there with her mother, Minnie, and her sister, Florence, when Florence was between marriages. By 1994 Mamie had been in a nursing home for ten years, and her neighbor, Esther Kline, had purchased the house and its contents in order to provide cash for Rand to get the care that she needed. When Glowen met Kline at a family funeral in Spokane, Glowen discovered that Kline owned a house completely filled with all the material accumulation of a life that spanned the entire twentieth century.

Glowen's life has not been the same since that day.

Mamie Rand's life and Kathy Glowen's life are now interconnected, despite the fact that they met only three times before Mamie died in 1995 at the age of 101. At those three meetings, Glowen felt a sense of rapport with Mamie as well as common interests (offbeat knickknacks) and passions (love of animals). She gained permission to make an artwork from Mamie's lifelong accumulation of objects.

Thus began an obsessive endeavor to create a story from the dozens of full and disordered boxes of Mamie's possessions, boxes that had been carelessly packed, broken into, and damaged. Moving boxes, and boxes, and more boxes to her studio in Arlington, Washington, Glowen began a dialogue with the woman who collected so many things, in some cases the very same things that Glowen herself collects. As an artist, Glowen has long pursued the practice of collaging found objects into layered and humorous statements. This installation, however, reverses her usual process of discovering materials for her work in thrift stores. Here Glowen was given a mountain of material that belonged to a particular person; from it she has reverentially constructed a history of a woman, a multifaceted narrative that pays homage to Mamie.

PETLAND has many parts and many stories, but these are stories told with respect, from one woman to another, of a matriarchal world and a woman's life. In many ways, the story is unremarkable, typical of the period spanning the 1920s to the 1950s.

Mamie Rand's father, Frank P Rand, is closer to the category that we arbitrarily define as artist. When Mamie was a child, he was an itinerant photographer who went from one tiny town to another in Montana making penny postcards and then moving on. He was a would-be inventor of something called Mapeleat, a maple flavoring. Later, at Newman Lake, northwest of Spokane, he pursued spiritual experiences and utopian physical culture philosophies, and grew enormous sunflowers.

The centerpiece of Glowen's PETLAND installation is Mamie Room. Using only the materials from Mamie's house, Glowen here constructs a biography in two parts. The first depicts Mamie's early years with her family, her schooling, her hobbies (particularly embroidery and piano playing), and even her social activities, signified by such objects as copy books, sheet music, and music books. Rand's musical interest was actually significantly more than a hobby. She played the violin and the piano well enough to perform in public and to be a music teacher. Stacks of magazines-Inside Detective, Home Arts, Physical Culture-point to Mamie's other interest. Glowen ironed piles of Mamie's embroidered linens and miscellaneous pieces of material to include in this section in order to invoke one of the repetitious rituals of domesticity that were also part of Mamie's life.

The second part of Mamie's Room refers to her adult career as a pet store owner and dealer in dogs, light brahmas (a type of show hen that she raised from 1914 until the 1960s), goats, pet birds (canaries and parakeets), cats, lizards, and other assorted animals. The magazines here are Milk Goat News, Washington Farmer, American Rabbit, Small Stock Magazine, Dogdom, and Dog World. The objects include such things as boxes of fish food, flea killers, and dog medicines. Mamie ran her pet store, PETLAND, near the posh Pedicord Hotel in downtown Spokane in the 1920s and 1930s; her sister, Florence, ran the Bouquet Barber Shop nearby. As her business faltered during the Depression, Mamie also worked as an accountant for True Oil Company and Hocking Drugstore. When her business began losing too much money in the 1940s, she ran her pet store out of her home. Glowen found stacks of supplies from the store still intact in the late 1990s.

The piles of old pet store supplies and magazines are only a small percentage of the total quantity of objects that Glowen has used in Mamie's Room. Glowen has created order from a stupefying accumulation of ordinary things, objects we all have around the house. Using the assemblage approach, she has put these objects into tidy compartments. In doing so, Glowen has tied up the chaos that she found in Mamie's ravaged house in 1994 and given us a version of Mamie Rand's identity.