The piece that I put into the Chain Letter exhibition is a bit different than my paintings, but actually relates a lot with work I used to do, which I don’t have up online anywhere. This year has been good in that I’ve been exploring and revisiting old styles of working, concepts and imagery. I guess my work has constantly been recycling and reinventing itself, but always keeping with the same themes and influences, despite how disparate all my different series may seem when seen together. I can see how everything relates, especially when places in chronological order, but I’m not sure if it is entirely evident to other people.
The image found on the front of the postcard is actually made of two different pictures. One is from an old slide that I found in a stash bought by a friend from an antique shop in Vancouver. The image of the young woman stood out and it is one of my favourite images and photographs. I was really influenced by the mess of floral patterns found in the original image, which is perhaps a bit difficult to see in my manipulated image. The second image is from a postcard from Hawaii, which is only viewed through the words “I WISH YOU WERE WISHING YOU WERE HERE YOU WISH YOU WERE WISHING YOU WERE HERE”, repeated across the entire image.
The words WISHING/WISH appears 200 times in the image…and there is a stack of 200 postcards displayed. The work is meant to be viewed as a whole piece on its own, the entire stack, but it can also be one postcard. I don’t want to go too much into explaining the piece, as I like to leave my work open to interpretation. I did, however, want to describe the image, as it is hard to make out in the other photograph in my previous post, which showed the entire stack. Also, in the exhibition itself, it gets lost in the mix of things, so I’m not sure if people will actually be able to see the work up close. So this is a preview for those who visit the show and can’t walk up to the work and also for those who aren’t in LA and can’t see the show.