Let's make the internet personal again
On idiosyncratic collections, strange interests, and making art.
Since the last newsletter (they're going out nearly monthly at this point) I've: shared my ten favorite photos from March, 2024, a gallery of found papers, a gallery of old books, written about margins, and shared my ten favorite photos from April, 2024.
I’ve also added a new page to my website, which I’m calling “The Museum of Bottle Drawings.” At the moment it features 65 sketchbook pages (mostly paper, a few digital), and 330 bottles, vases, or vessels of some kind. I’m planning on keeping this up until I reach 1,000 bottles, etc., at which point…I don’t know. If you are into drawings of bottles, well, there’s no better site on the internet.
Would you like it if I shared every blog post/website update here?
My blog is more active than this newsletter for a variety of reasons, but here's a question for everyone: Would you like it if I shared every blog post/website update here? That would mean you'd have gotten five emails from me last month, instead of the one. Let me know. I like sharing my work and my thoughts but it's not easy to know how to do it best.
In my collage work right now I'm thinking a lot about collections - how collages are collections of discrete items with histories, as much as stand-alone works of art, and that this goes in both directions. The first way I articulated this idea to myself in a way that made sense was with the statement, "an exhibition is just one collage spread out across all the walls of a gallery." A version of this is written in black Sharpie on a piece of paper hanging in my studio along with a few other "thesis statements". Are they helping my work? Watch this space (and my website) and you tell me.
An exhibition is just one collage spread out across all the walls of a gallery.
Historically one of the most influential ways of thinking about collections was the Wunderkammer, or Cabinet of Curiosities. Today we rightfully look at these as containing a lot of cultural appropriation and "othering" non-European cultures, but the idea of a personally-tended, intensely idiosyncratic remains compelling.
"We often build our senses of personal taste by saving pieces of culture: slowly building a collection of what matters to us, a monument to our preferences. Like a bird constructing a nest.
When we find something meaningful enough to save, to add to our collection, the action both etches it a little deeper into our hearts and creates a context around the artifact itself...
Collections need individual caretakers, whose voices and tastes they express."
Filterworld, Kyle Chayka
I am a magpie for old paperwork, abandoned letters, and old photographs. I tend a collection of banalities, a cabinet of ephemera without any clear value with the hope, or belief that inside them, in the connections between them, there's a story that matters.
I tend a collection of banalities…
In conjunction with this I'm thinking about how I show my work. I'm interested in showing in galleries (and if anyone has any connections, don't be shy) but I'm open to the idea that zines, artist books, or digital exhibitions may give me different opportunities to play with the idea of collections and links between different works. I also want to find some low-friction ways to share not just finished collages but the provenance of the source images. Provenance works like a map, pointing both at where something was but also at where it is now and where it's going. It's not the story "inside" the artifact but the story of the artifact itself. To that note I'm photographing lots of scraps, and looking up the histories of books before I remove pages from them. There's no realistic way for me to trace more than a few of these items back to their original source but the more I can find out, and the more I can share, the deeper the work gets - at least that's what I hope.
I've added a new gallery of work to my website, a series of work characterised by a gesso-framed window in the uppermost collage element, revealing other items below. I've yet to write more about this series but there should be a blog post about them within a week or two.
None of these are in the store yet, but are available if you're interested. Just drop me a line and we'll work something out.
We don't need big companies telling us what's worth paying attention to.
Thanks everyone for your interest and let me what you've liked or not liked, or share your own work, or your own personal, idiosyncratic collection. Let's make the internet personal again. We don't need big companies telling us what's worth paying attention to.
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