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As I begin a free artist residency at Public Space One, I’ve been given this opportunity to blog about the experience. By putting my thoughts (and my questions) out there in an open-ended forum, I hope to get comments and conversation back. The blog series will be a continuing thread, with Part Two elaborating and reflecting on Part One, and so on.
This is a photograph I found in the parking lot of my apartment complex, about ten years ago. It shows four children in Halloween costumes, posed in front of a house. The print itself is damaged from having been run over by countless cars, as it lay face-down on the gravel where it was found.
The word “treat” has been scratched out of the sign in the background by this process. One girl’s face has been half-obliterated, and a cloaked goblin’s body has been worn away, leaving exposed layers of emulsion looking like a lo-fi explosion. The Oompa Loompa is the largest one of all, and seems boxed in by a trio of demonic figures, framed perfectly by a triangular spider web decoration.
I had been taking photographs around town, when I noticed a flyer kiosk. A public bulletin board. All the flyers had been torn off of it that morning, which had transformed it into a display of the wooden panel itself, the hundreds of embedded staples, and the different colored paper scraps that clung onto them. Fragments of words could be seen here and there.
As I thought about which angle to shoot it from, I realized a picture of this beautiful object wasn’t going to cut it. A lot was going to be lost in the conversion to a 2D image. The true, bright colors (and the faded ones). The subtle stains on the wood from rusty staples that had been rained on time and again. The almost-imperceptible flutterings of the larger paper fragments when a breeze blew by. So, I went back at night with a screwdriver and removed the entire wood panel from its frame. I nailed it to the gallery wall.
To make another piece, I went through all the bathroom stalls nearby, and wrote down the graffiti that I found scratched into the walls. I took 100 of the most interesting phrases (some vulgar, some poignant), and displayed them, scrolling in LED lights, on an electronic text banner. This was a a parody of, and an homage to, Jenny Holzer’s “Truisms” series, which used similar LED signs to amplify statements about life.
