EMMA STERN 

Wild @ Heart

Artist Reception: February 15th, 6-8 PM

February 15th - March 15th, 2023

Wild @ Heart (Walking in LA)

Nobody walks in LA, they say, but there’s always an exception that proves the rule.

The first time I came here I forgot to bring a toothbrush, so I looked up the nearest CVS. Only 20 minutes by foot, which back in New York City is about how far I walk every morning for my $5 iced coffee. In the 20 minutes it took me to get to CVS, two Priuses pulled over and rolled down their windows to ask, “Are you okay?” I tell myself learning how to drive makes no sense, that if I wait a few more years it’ll all be self-driving anyway. Truth is, if I had a nickel for every man who ever promised to teach me how to drive, I’d have 45 cents.

Nobody walks in LA, not even me anymore, but every morning I do 45 minutes on the elliptical machine in the gym on the seventh floor of the high-rise I’m staying in downtown. Better to be a hamster on a wheel than a rat in a cage, I tell myself, better to be a fly on the wall than a worm on a hook.

The gym is always pristine, and it’s always empty aside from the same employee who’s in there every day. She wears a t-shirt with the building’s sans serif logo, emblazoned in Day-Glo across her chest like she’s the CEO of a start-up at a weekend employee retreat and not a teenager mopping the floor of a gym. We don’t speak. Neither one of us takes it personally. The elliptical machines face a wall of floor-to-ceiling windows that overlook a courtyard where the communal jacuzzi is. Water suspiciously blue, glistening like a sour candy.

People say it never rains in LA, but it’s been pissing buckets since New Year’s Eve. “A once-in-a-lifetime weather event,” they’re calling it, but it feels like I hear about a once-in-a-lifetime weather event every six months lately. This morning while I was walking on the elliptical, I looked up from the reality show streaming on my phone ( (Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders: Making the Team) and watched the jacuzzi overflowing with rainwater and spilling over the ledge of the courtyard onto S. Spring Street below. Turns out every pool is an infinity pool if it’s raining hard enough. Its engorged surface is disrupted from the repeated penetration, steam rising off it like a methane-rich exoplanet deemed unsuitable for carbon-based life.

Can’t explain why this makes me think about when I went to Peru by myself for no reason when I was 19 years old to stay with a family I’d met on Facebook in a hut on top of a hill in San Roque de Cumbaza, a rural jungle region in the Upper Amazon Basin. I had so much trouble sleeping those first nights, because of all the noise. I could never identify the specific sounds, what they were or from what direction they came, but I distinctly remember feeling with certainty that I was hearing plants grow en masse. One morning, Trina asked how I’d slept. Trina’s family owned the hut at the top of the hill, her husband, Daniel, had built it himself. Daniel was a local from San Martin, a neighboring village, but Trina was a white lady from London. She’d also met Daniel on Facebook and moved there to be with him and, as she told it, “to heal.” She had a huge tattoo of a dolphin on her back and a four-leaf clover on her ankle, and I think she used to do a lot of drugs. I told Trina I wasn’t sleeping well. Told her, “I thought nowhere could be noisier than New York City at night. I thought the jungle would be quiet, thought it would be peaceful.” Trina laughed and told me I was ridiculous to think that. She said, ”Think about it: A city is a graveyard. All that concrete . . . everything in a city is dead. In the jungle, everything is alive, everything talks to each other.”

Can’t explain why watching the jacuzzi flood the courtyard with rainwater while I try to keep my heart rate over 130 makes me think about Trina, about my time in the jungle. Of how I’d walk down the hill to the river every morning to fill up a Nalgene bottle with water, then trek back up the hill, and then use it to make the best goddamn cup of coffee of my life.

128…130…131…129…

Can’t explain why watching the jacuzzi flood the courtyard with rainwater is making me think of something I heard on a podcast a while ago, about how, when domesticated pigs escape from farms and then reproduce in the wild, it takes only one generation for the offspring to begin presenting tusks, and tufts of hair on the ears, and other outward characteristics of wild boar.

132…130…132…

D. H. Lawrence wrote, “I’ve never seen a wild thing feel sorry for itself,” and this morning on the elliptical, I think I finally understood what he meant.

Did you know that New York State is turning into a temperate rainforest? In fact, due to an increasingly warm and wet climate, newly minted rainforests like the state of New York will likely be saddled with an increasingly large burden of the planet's carbon capture, as tropical rainforests in places like Brazil, Bolivia, and Peru heat up and dry out. I’m used to the rain in New York, but LA is not built for this. It’s still coming down like the sky’s been pregnant and SURPRISE! It’s triplets. I keep looking up from Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders: Making the Team and gazing into the courtyard at the bloated jacuzzi, and for a moment I think I must be tripping because at the water’s edge I see an ocelot. The creature is muscular, sleek, moves like an apex predator, CEO of the food chain. Its massive paws half-submerged in the inches of rainwater and striped coat glistening, it slinks around the jacuzzi’s perimeter like it’s the Amazon River. It puts its face to the surface and laps at the cocktail of acid rain and chlorine. I blink a few times to make sure I’m seeing straight, and only then do I notice it’s wearing a collar. It takes another moment for me to notice a woman trailing not far behind the animal. She’s got an instagram nose job and a fake ass, and she’s trying in vain to stay dry under the courtyard awning as she scrolls unenthusiastically on her phone, glancing up briefly at her wet pet. I can’t help but wonder if she’s paying the standard $120 per month deposit for pets in the building or if it’s slightly higher for large, exotic jungle cats. She’s getting dripped on; I can tell she’s concerned about her extensions and about ready to head inside, but the ocelot surprises us both when it dives headfirst into the jacuzzi.

129…128…129…

I will never be as happy as this ocelot frolicking in the jacuzzi in the pouring rain. Or maybe that’s just me feeling sorry for myself. And it’s strange, because I thought cats were supposed to hate water, but I suppose there’s always an exception that proves the rule.

To make an appointment click HERE

For inquiries email erin@halfgallery.com