Last August I submitted a proposal to Seattle Restored for a window installation involving house-shaped collages. It was seeded by two things: a scrap of paper I found in my studio and then became slightly totally obsessed with, and the oddities of a childhood that involved a lot of time spent with people at least 70 years older than me. There is also the realization that my hometown and the places so fundamental to my formative memories have, for many years, been in steady, heartbreaking decline.
My proposal was recently accepted, and I’ve decided to make the project more personal than originally intended. I’m curious about how this work will influence my dreams, which almost always involve remixes of the houses where I grew up.
I’m building 6 of these houses, or rather, the impression of them etched in my mind from when I was very young, in the form of large collages.
On Instagram, I mused that a part of me wishes I could go back in time once the project is installed to compare the reality of what actually existed with the story I’ve edited over the years. I wonder about where I’ve embellished ordinary, trivial details until they’ve become nostalgic touchstones. I also wonder if I’d be disappointed by the reconciliation because perhaps I have cast too high a gloss on those memories.
I’ll be writing about it over the next several months, both here and in printed material that I’ll publishing in conjunction with this project. There will also be some prints based on the artwork created for the installation.
Until the first written installment arrives in early November when the installation goes up, here’s the mockup I submitted with my proposal. The structures here are completely invented, not based on anything other than the form.
The text for the windows, which will be used in the installation, reads:
Before it was a flophouse, it was a promise, a place to park a lifetime of heartache and hard work. Before that it was a grand idea skirting a future not quite long enough to reach reality.
In my dreams I open the door to a closet that was never there.
Back then, with enough determination, any house was a mobile home. It took longer for wind and dry rot to dismantle it than they spent fantasizing about life on the new lot. Years of sunrises and full moons arced over it, lonely as it waited for them, their boxes never unpacked.
Love it!