Chainsaw Jenna seems a bit wistful as we stand in the amber shadows of Descanso Gardens, fallen oak leaves underfoot sending up their bittersweet perfume. One potential reason: she couldn’t bring her favorite chainsaw to La Cañada via airplane, and perhaps feels a bit naked without it.
And, after weeks of hard labor and shaking pounds of wood shavings from her blonde hair, her work here is finally done.
The name “Chainsaw Jenna” conjures thoughts of bulk, mass, neck tattoos, tongue piercings, perhaps prison-time, all served up with plenty of salty attitude.
But the reality is quite different. She’s 23-year-old Jenna Ceriani of Newcastle, Pennsylvania, petite, cheerleader-sparkly, with crystalline blue eyes and a megawatt smile, and she rocks a gas-burning chainsaw the way most women wield a lip-gloss. She’s the official voice of the Pennsylvania Great Outdoors Visitors Bureau, and her “Carving of the Month” videos attract half a million followers.
Ceriani carved The Pine Family specifically for this exhibition, a monumental gathering of five Wood Spirits that is the central installation in “Carved,” Descanso Garden’s mirthful twilight Halloween event, now in its third year.
“The largest of these guys is the grandfather, at about ten feet,” she says. “They’re all White Pine, so the wood is pretty soft compared with oak.”
The Gauguin-evoking mother of the group measures about eight feet in height, while her son, a butterfly perched upon the bridge of his nose, is a mere six feet. She’s been on pins and needles as the family of Wood Spirits traveled 2,200 miles, each enclosed inside what Ceriani calls its own “coffin.”
“Actually, it’s just a really solid crate.”
“My parents both carve,” she says of Tom and Dawna, who own and operate T & D Carvings in Brockway, PA. “To be honest, I wasn’t sure I wanted to carve because I accompanied my parents to lots of carving shows when I was a kid, and I’m the oldest, so it was like daycare. I had to babysit my younger siblings when we were out on the road. But, there’s sawdust in my blood, I guess. Here I am.”
If the Rapa Nui of Easter Island had grown up watching Disney cartoons circa 1100 CE, then their enigmatic Maoi figures might resemble Ceriani’s.
The Pine dad in particular, with his elongated head, huge eyes and goofy teeth, suggests Sebastian, the red hermit crab from Disney’s “The Little Mermaid,” and Lumière, the debonaire singing candle from “Beauty and the Beast.”
The young carver and her husband Ben, a videographer, work on four acres of Ben’s 72-acre family property in the house that belonged to his grandparents.
“I’m the only noisy neighbor,” she laughs. “Luckily, our nearest neighbors are about a mile or so down the road, so not too many complaints.”
And as for pumpkins, expert carver Zach Faraday, who has carved for Descanso Gardens’ Halloween celebrations for the past nine years, says, “Honestly, I’ve lost count. Maybe 150, maybe 200, Maybe more” when asked how many he’s carved for this year’s gathering. Just as Ceriani slings the power tools, Faraday, a superb portrait artist, works with fine tools used to sculpt clay. Some carvers in his league go a step further, using dental implements to cut exquisitely refined detail.
A helpful hint from Faraday, “It’s so sad that most people carving a pumpkin at home cut off the top as their first step. This is wrong because the stem area is like the keystone in an arch. The entire weight of the pumpkin rests on that top area. Then they pull out the guts, the pulp and the slime and the seeds. This causes the pumpkin to begin decaying immediately. So the sides start to curve and curl in and collapse, and it all starts to shrivel up. Very sad.”
Pro-tip on the seeds: air-dry or sun-dry them before popping them in a low-and-slow oven to toast up an indigenous snack.
His carving technique is the reverse of the usual DIY jack-o’-lantern home crime scene.
“I draw the image on the front of the pumpkin and then do very light, shallow strokes with the blades, never going through the wall. The insides of the pumpkin are still in there, keeping the pumpkin intact and fresh up until the very last minute. Gutting is the absolute last step, not the first.”
Faraday produces an effect that’s similar to a stained glass window when the gourd is finally opened up in the back and hollowed out, and an LED candle is stationed inside.
He selects and transports his own pumpkins, favoring the 60-70 pounders known as Big Macs, grown on farms in Manteca or Moorpark. “They’re both heavy AND fragile,” he says, echoing material challenges also expressed by Jenna Ceriani of her massive works.
“I love interacting with people,” he says, “and so I carve lots of figures that get kids so excited. It’s really fun.”
All 150 acres of Descanso Gardens glow with the gold and orange of a Monarch butterfly’s wing, including a massive public ofrenda or altar for the Day of the Dead, serenaded by life-size papier-mache mariachis en calavera (skeletonized) on November 1.
In pre-contact Mexico, local belief systems linked the Monarch to the dearly departed, in part because the butterfly’s traditional migration coincided with the end of what Europeans and their descendants know as October. Using the notecards, pencils and tiny clothespins provided, you can affix your own prayer to the communal clothesline that wraps the huge altar like an ex voto rebozo.
Every so often this summer, a rumor has bubbled to the surface concerning a verrrrry large reptile lurking in the murky waters of a local pond. Evidence was thin until now: sea-monster sightings are guaranteed at Descanso Gardens this season. This neo-Nessie rises from its watery home in impressively snaky ripples adorned with dried gourds.
“Years ago, we started off using fresh gourds,” recalls Jennifer Erricho, director of marketing communications for the gardens. “But our squirrels would literally leap from the branches of the oak trees across open water to land on the sea monster and eat into the gourds.”
This year’s incarnation sports a Quetzalcoatl-like topknot / headdress, lending a bit of groovy, festival-ready Coachellousy to the vibe.
Autumn vignettes throughout the park play out Halloween and Muertos themes. Perhaps thousands of plastic jack-o’-lanterns of all sizes, shapes and moods fill the nooks and side gardens adjacent to the main lawn where CARVED activities take place. In a turn of poetic supreme justice, a towering, top-hatted scarecrow with steampunk goggles and the head of a corvid spreads his somber wings.
Over the doorway of the Pumpkin House, a romantic gourd-decorated cottage accessible through a hay bale maze, two crookneck squashes nestle like a pair of yellow-orange striped swans, mated for life. Their necks meet to form a harvest heart.
The October sun glints off a golden strand stretched between two dry cornstalks. A step closer reveals a convincingly gossamer model of a spider web, probably spun from mylar or monofilament. At its center crouches a remarkably lifelike Argiope Argentata, an arachnid native to Southern California. (Nice touch, Descanso.) Its abdomen of auburn velvet is the size of my thumb.
I put my cheaters on and lean in to check out the fake spider, and suddenly it stirs, stretching two clawed limbs in my direction. Like a Busby Berkeley outtake, it displays and flexes all eight legs, then skips away toward a tattered cabbage moth that lies feebly flapping at the edge of its web.
The spider is real. I’ve been had. I‘ve been duped.
DEETS
- CARVED
- Descanso Gardens
- 1418 Descanso Drive, La Cañada Flintridge
- 818-949-4200
- Now through October 30th
- Entry times: 6:00 PM, 6:30 PM, 7:00 PM, 7:30 PM, 8:00 PM, 8:30 PM, 9:00 PM
- CARVED is a rain-or-shine event. Tickets are non-refundable with timed entry, and must be purchased in advance via the Descanso Gardens Web site at www.descansogardens.org.
