when i was 15, my father moved into a house designed by r.m. schindler. it’s a long story, but when my father bought his house, there was in a crawlspace under the garage, where we found 3 cartons of old domus magazines, something like 40 issues. (if you don't know the magazine, it was an architecture/design/art magazine started in the 1920's and is still publishing every month).
after my father passed away, i started to think about the magazines, and that over time, i kept looking through them, like a conduit between myself and my father - and these dirty, silver fish eaten, mold, mildew - i mean they were in really bad shape. some of the pages were falling apart, but i kept them as some kind of special material between myself and my father. 4 years ago, i decided to work more seriously with the materials attempting to converse with the materials in the hope to suggest "moves".
i began by making paintings of my father's house, and used various aspects of the april 1964 domus cover which was published the month of my birth. other steps were a series of small collages (in homage to joseph cornell's late collages). the next step was using pages of the domus magazines, towards temporary collages, sort of collages, and sort of videos... but there were100 short videos, using all the pages of the april 1964 issue.
when i finished with the 100 short videos i felt like i had climbed a mountain, and yet still, i kept mining the materials for promise.
when i was asked to make a "sound mark" for the installation in denmark, i wanted it to be outside, so that the process of dying would be palpable, while over time these images would change simply because of the weather and the poor materials.
so i pulled 65 pages from 1960's issues of domus magazines, each page with the text “this is a part of a song for my father" - plastered across the image.
in this way, i didn't want to manipulate the pages myself, but to simply allow a “patina of decay”.
ultimately, i placed the images in windows of a huge empty space, most likely a factory... and the pages were placed in various locations - existing like fragments of a stanza of a poem, or a score or a lost dog note... and each image a stepping stone, or a breadcrumb.
over time, the images will fade from sun and weather, perhaps in a way that all things break down, no matter how much they long to remain...
i recently found this 2013 text i wrote about jack kirby's collages, and figured i'd post it here...
