On a sunny Los Angeles afternoon, Cirilo Domine has dragged the kitchen table to the middle of his Echo Park cottage garden. He settles under the canopy of a hundred year-old elm tree, among bundles of bamboo and sticks, to discuss his newest project. Bamboo is a fundamental component of the the artist’s work. Abundant in Southeast Asia, this ‘timber of the poor’ is the raw material for millions of workers who often struggle to meet their most basic needs. Domine bristles at the exploitation of these artisans and assemblers of baskets and backscratchers, purses and mats, or any of the hundreds of products that can take hours to craft. He insists that the men, women, and often children, who make these objects merit greater respect and dignity. By incorporating their techniques into his art he seeks to retranslate their intrinsic value. In his most recent work, the symbolic opulence of a tiara is reduced to simple outlines—a skeleton of itself. The new bamboo tiara emerges as an object of reclaimed value, a tribute to the unsung efforts of the basket maker, weaver and wood carver. Domine's approach fuses artisan tradition with his own art making process to offer a new discourse. Another piece, a tiara of rice and beans, is the artist’s response to the labels placed on men who are attracted to other men of a specific race. When gay culture refers to rice queens, bean queens and potato queens, Domine counters by inventing a multigrain queen embodied in a custom-made crown. He pauses to recall his reaction to a cooking magazine spread of individually photographed grains. The article classified the origin, shape and color variations of each as though they were gems. He contemplated the value of a single bean or grain of rice compared to that of a diamond and realized that the money raised by selling one precious stone might buy enough food to feed an entire village. Domine has used commodity materials before. His early work includes twelve codpieces entitled "Outlines and Seams" inspired by Jacopo Pontormo’s "Portrait of a Halberdier" at the Getty museum. "I remember standing in front of this painting of a young soldier with a flowery pouch covering his bulbous crotch," he recalls. "It commanded my attention." On the spot, Domine decided to trace the history of the codpiece from Pontormo's 16th century Italy to the present. This exploration culminated in a series of bamboo codpieces varnished and tinted to look like iron. "I focused on the curves, the pouch and every detail of desire concentrated in lines and contours. I looked directly at the crotch." When others ask why he has not embraced the latest synthetic materials or technologies of the day, Domine points to the romance he's had with his pile of sticks for ten years now. "The sticks keep coming back," he says, "I guess it's bigger than me. I am invested more than ever in the cosmos of two or three materials and the endless possibilities they offer." So while the trend may be to jump from one medium to the next over a year or a month or a week, for Cirilo Domine it's a steady crawl. "Maybe it's part of growing older," he suggests. By slowing down the process, the arc of making work has room to grow longer. by David Krantz