By Will Bowen | Downtown News

44th & Landis is in the heart of a neighborhood we now called City Heights. In 1982, when artist Margaret Noble moved there with her family as a 9-year-old girl, it was just a part of what was known as East San Diego.

“It’s a lower working class neighborhood with a diverse ethnic population. [Most] people there work two jobs or are on welfare,” Noble said.

“The neighborhood has changed a little since I was there as a girl … the City Heights Community Park is bigger and there is a school – Rosa Parks Elementary – but it has the same feel and the sounds are the same … the ice cream trucks, children playing, cars whizzing by. And the Cops say it’s still not safe!”

The area does indeed have a shady side, with drugs, prostitution, domestic violence, and crime evident, and it’s still a scary and dangerous place for children to grow up in.

Noble calls her own childhood adaptation to the neighborhood as, “Learning to navigate ‘the grid’ – where to play, buy candy, how to walk home from school, how to have fun.”

Fast forward 30 years, and the adult-Noble has created a reflexive multimedia psycho-geographic immersive walk-through art piece, based on the childhood memories of her old neighborhood, called “44th & Landis,” which will open at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD) on August 9. The work was funded by the San Diego Foundation, which hooked her up with the MCASD.

The exhibit, which will be installed in the Melinda Farris Wortz gallery space at the Museum, will feature clusters or sculptural clouds, which Noble calls “pods,” of six  12-inch tall paper dolls hanging from the ceiling.

Each cluster or pod will have a theme and walking through them will offer an immersive experience metaphorically similar to navigating the streets of City Heights as a child. Fourteen hand-made paper speakers will be positioned in the room to recreate the sonic atmosphere of the neighborhood. The result: a visual and auditory metaphorical return to childhood.

The paper dolls Noble is making for her exhibition will be embellished with thematic art based on a merger of Victorian style and the video games, candies, music, ad pop culture of the 1980s.

“The Victorian theme is emblematic of my desire to escape to something more proper and refined, while the 1980s pop culture is what actually was there,” Noble said.

“I was intensely happy as a child making paper dolls with my mother, and they were my main toy, inexpensively made. That is why I chose them for my exhibit.”

Noble, who currently teaches media and digital art at Liberty Station’s High Tech High, attended Hoover High and graduated from Mission Bay High. She then went on to earn a BA in philosophy from UCSD, with an emphasis on logic and analytics, but says that the subjects as taught there were, “Maddening and more based on winning an argument in class than understanding reality better.”

Noble also studied dance at UCSD and worked as a local DJ. After graduation, she moved to Chicago because of greater opportunities in the DJ trade and her interest in “Chicago house music.”  After a time she decided to enroll at the Chicago School of Art & Design and focus on Sound Art; thinking that it might help her to do something to better the world, rather than just analyze it philosophically.

“My current work is an attempt to understand the childhood experience in an urban setting,” she said. “My work looks at identity, class, and culture through the lens of a child. How do media, music, and video games help create the maps we use to negotiate and understand the world we live in? However, although there is a concept behind my piece, it is also meant to be just experienced and enjoyed without analysis.”

Jill Dawsey, who is an associate curator at MCASD says, “The exhibit will not tell you what to think but rather promote thought, memories, reflection, and conversation.”

In conjunction with her exhibition, Noble will give two performances on October 20 and November 17 from 7 – 8:30 p.m. at the MCASD, where she will perform sonic works composed of sampled environmental sounds mixed with electronic music,  rhythmic voice recitations, and radio commentary.

The opening of her exhibit on August 9 from 7-10 p.m. will coincide with the Museum’s TNT (Thursday Night Thing). TNT is a gala event held in all three of the museum buildings, as well as on the patio and spilling out onto the 1000 block of Kettner. TNT will feature music, food, dance, libations, and great socializing to an art backdrop.

Cris Scorza, the education curator at MCASD describes TNT as, “An explosion of art, culture, and music where 600-800 people gather and socialize about the arts.”

Rebecca Handelsman, the executive director of communications, adds, “TNT is a great way for people to see our exhibitions. The MCASD space is complete transformed and brought to life so that people can engage with it in a dynamic way.”

The festivities will also include: DJ Mark Quark, the live band Mrs. Magician, break dancers, and the Urban Effect Dance troupe. The MIHO gastro truck will be there and Whole Foods Market staff will be making fresh salsa to sample.

In addition to the Noble installation, patrons can view Isaac Julian’s nine-screen video installation, featuring sweeping landscape footage of China; the gold Chinese animal zodiac heads of Ai Wei Wei; a room-sized light and space exhibition by Doug Wheeler; a land art piece by Richard Long; and an anthropological film from 1978 by Juan Downey. Noble will do a Q & A for Museum Members at 7:30 PM in the Berglund Room and be available for conversation at her exhibition shortly after that.

The cost is $10, $8 for students, and free for museum members. For further information see:  mcasd.org or Margaretnoble.net.