Pages pages and found more pages

This is a notebook I kept in 2004 or 2005. I made the notebook with a binding machine at my office, and after each opaque page I’d bound in a translucent page. Mostly I played in this book while sat on the couch in my apartment, cut out things from magazines, and glued them in. There are found photos and notes, found drawings made by kids, too. My favorite one is the half of a card, addressed “Hello Lody.” The thing about found papers, notes, photos, drawings, is not so much the thing itself, but how it came to be in this de-exalted position. Photographs of loving people, of people who were loved. Drawings that children spent time perfecting, spent time choosing the right color, the best way to represent an arm, or a flower. A thing that had real meaning in one moment is suddenly on the street, run over by feet and cars, and I think I felt for these things, these things that were discarded but still expressed so much caring. I wanted them to be cared for again, I wanted to cherish the original intent, the original intender. I wanted to receive, and to accept, this lost love, and in that way send love back.

I was in grad school at Columbia, studying primarily with Eduardo Machado and Kelly Stuart. If you know anything about art grad school, you know it’s like having your heart ripped out, dissected, drained of it’s blood, and then being told you should be more open. My heart was hugely open in grad school, and it was a process to get it there. Once school was out, I shoved my heart back in to the gaping hole it left, stitched up my chest, and tried to make work that was structurally sound, water tight, air tight, able to withstand 100 year floods. Now I’m realizing that I can swim, that I don’t mind a thatched hut, that my go-bag is packed and ready in case of disaster, and that air tightness means I can’t breathe. I’m tunneling my way out, because I forgot to put in any doors, and I’ve found all these old notes buried in the walls. We’ll see.