Someone I think asked me why I make these or maybe they asked how do these come about or maybe they didn't express any interest at all...-I just don't remember. Which may answer one of those questions.
I find them interesting because they are made from trash from things I normally would just throw away and they are made from things I find on the ground like smooshed beer cans crushed under the weight of parking cars. And every image I find I think of as time passed. The papers will no longer be made the beer cans also as well as the stickers. They are all gone forever soon...and I find them as sort of beautiful artifacts of a present that is already gone.
And I think that may be their meaning -that the present is already gone forever, that it cannot be remembered in any real sense, the details are already blurry, the future rushes toward us, and promises nothing real, only more present to be ground under and thrown away.
I don't think that sad. I think it is only a kind of reminder to hold the past in memory. To think to find some way to fill in an emptiness that exists for and in all of us...that the instant of the future is forever crushing anything and everything we have made.
collage bfk rives
doug, i think that's a beautiful sentiment and i think it really comes through in your collages and even some of your other work. the idea that the present is really only a knife-edge, a razor-edge, an infinitesimal instant. the present is immeasurably small compared to the past and the future, and neither of those is ever directly accessible. we can only access the past with memory, and the future we can only guess at.
ReplyDeleteit's funny to me that the present, the only facet of time that's really tangible, is so fleeting as to be almost nonexistent. and yet, that's always where we are-- in the present. perception is like a true two-dimensional object: if you step to the side and try to see how deep it is, it blinks out of existence.
i love your collages. to me they evoke nostalgia tenderly and honestly. i think using trash to communicate something beautiful says a lot about where beauty comes from-- that beauty doesn't come from within an object; it comes from within us. we imbue the world with beauty that is born inside of us, woven out of hope and memories and love. or something like that...
whoa Nick...you're out writing me my friend...and out thinking me too...!
Deletethank you India...I had to read Nick's comments to begin to get it..
ReplyDelete