SECOND LIFE

It is always nice to have a second chance in life...... With the clothing that I found, I am turning them into other things.  It is nice  to think that a homeless pair of running pants can implode into a teddy bear.

STREET CLOTHES

The catalyst for this piece was a passage from the The New Testament Matthew 6.25 http://bible.oremus.org/?ql=165539089 . It has always been in the back of my mind because I think that the idea behind it is beautiful. So, I when out on my bicycle to find something to wear. I spent a few days riding around back alleys and empty city lots mostly, and in which time a found this outfit. Again, I documented on instagram each article as I found it. I pondered on the beautiful and poetic despair of each piece as I found them. Some pieces were so close to disintegrating into the earth that I fell like the boy who pulled the frozen girl out of the ravine, seconds before her last breath drifted away for good. I had myself photographed in the outfit. I remember thinking …These are not the clothes I would ever choose to wear… But, in actuality, that is exactly what I did.

16 BUS RIDES

I started by capturing my day-to-day life on instagram. Going to and from work on the bus, cataloging each bus ride, documenting the number of the bus, the direction, and the time of travel. After a time I became aware of how mundane  my life seemed. 28 years of taking public transportation to the same job. I decided to take pictures myself within the bus. Bearing in mind how the pictures were archived in Instagram (4 across back then) I would create a portrait of Myself. One that would appear still, yet be moving through time. After 16 bus rides, a self portrait was made. It became a small documentation of myself, moving through time and space, in 16 fleeting bus rides out of thousands. Though, I look rather bold in this orange jumpsuit, when you do the math of all the bus rides I have taken. it was really just a blip in time.

On the jumpsuit I wore were the words I AM HERE, taken from an old slogan I heard as a pre teen,"You are here, be here now".  It came from a book my sister had called Remember Be Here Now, by Ram Dass. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_Here_Now_(book)

FLESH

I made a portrait of myself with a gallon of latex paint. I had my flesh scanned by a spectrophotometer at a Home Depot. It is a pure unbiased analysis of myself, far better than I could do. It discerns my physical essence like a photograph. Photographs after all are merely meaningless dots and digital information squeezed together. It is up to the viewer to put the dots and pixels together and come up with their own feelings and conclusions about them .... As of yet, I have not done anything with this gallon of paint. In the past, painted a canvases and a taxidermied magpie with my analyzed paint, But for right now it is an inert portrait, full of possibilities..... One day I wish to have a lover, and have them analyzed, and paint my room the color of their flesh.

CITIZEN

While on the subject of Memory, or, the lack of it, I thought it this film was relative .....Two friends of mine were involved in a car accident, after which both there lives moved in to different ways. Iris was confined to months in a wheel chair, and Beth was confined to a hospital, suffering from a severe brain injury. The lost of memory and the inability to care for ,and even connect with a lover is a dark and lonely situation. This story ends with a beautiful reparation.

THE CICADA

In 1993, I made 6 shirts. Then, I took them to the cleaners and asked to have them laundered and boxed . I put the box in the back of my closet. I would take it out on occasion to look at look at it, knowing that there were these colorful shirts  inside the simple white box. When I showed the box to people, I would tell them that they would just have to believe me, that there were 6 brightly colored shirts inside. I never opened the box until February, 2007. The film is a document of the opening of the box. I put the shirts back in the box, and that's the last time I saw them. I sent the box to a friend and asked her to do the same with the shirts... She mentioned that she was going to sew little objects into the shirts before taking them to the cleaners. I said that it was wonderful; besides, it is no longer my piece.....  The piece reminded me of The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupery, and the theory of Schroeder's Cat. Hiding the shirts even further in the back of the closet for 13 years reminder me of the life cycle of Cicada.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cicada#Life_cycle

THE PHOTO

                                             

                                   

Wallet-size replicas of that kindergarten photograph. A representation of the past. A past that is becoming more blurred and innocuous, The more vague, the easier it is to insinuating itself into other peoples lives. It becomes graffiti, turned inward, in someone else's personal space. A small graffiti ending in the bottom of a purse, a pocket,  tucked inside a wallet or tacked up on an office bulletin board.... If you send me your address I will send you some.

THE MEMORY

The point from A to B grows longer and thinner and blurs considerably with time. 46 years ago I was placed upon a stool, lights were flashed, and a photograph was taken. I don't remember what kind of stool I sat on, the brightness of the flashes, or anything of the event. All that I recall is  by what my newer experiences and logic tells me, and any lack of information, I make up the difference. That way, I can still see the lights flash before me like it was yesterday. When I remember like that, I condense time and fold it like a blanket, causing one event to touch another completely unrelated event. layered on top of other events. The photograph reminds me of the flashes of light, which in turn, reminds me of the death of my Mother, which can cause me to remember dropping Deracell batteries into April mud. And so on...On this temporal bed of memories, the only truth about this picture is that I marveled that my mouth resembled the shape of a pickle when I first saw it.