F. Scott Hess

Renovation is 10 a.m. in the Hours of the Day series. A group of men are intently reconstructing a house on a sunny morning, while children play in the background. The setting is similar to the view from my backyard in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, and the building they were banging away on was my little shack/studio that I worked out of for many years. I’d thrown up some 2 × 4′s on it’s porch just for this image, and had to tear them down afterwards as the demands of my pictorial composition were at odds with proper building techniques for my little studio extension.

The men depicted are all the members of a short-lived art collaborative called the Bastards. We did a number of artworks collectively, and exhibited a couple of times in Los Angeles (1999) and once in Seattle (2000). From left to right they are Jon Swihart, Peter Zokosky, John Frame, Steve Galloway (yellow shirt), Michael McMillen (on the ladder), myself (white T-shirt), and McMillen again from the rear (in red).