My brilliant friend Kelsy Burke is a sociologist and the current editor of “Contemporary Sociology,” an academic journal publishing “reviews and critical discussions of recent works in sociology and related disciplines that merit the attention of sociologists.”
I was thrilled when Kelsy asked about licensing some of my work for the cover of a forthcoming issue of the journal. It’s out now and I got to hold a print copy in my hand! Yeah, print! I love seeing and feeling the design decisions behind printed objects: content, of course, but also paper weight, font families, and color. It hits differently in meat space.
The image on the cover is a grayscale version of my screenprint What They Had: Appleton, WI. It features ink drawings of various objects left behind in exchange for seedballs as part of my sculpture What You’ve Got. There’s a guitar pick and a jingle bell, a plastic pig and a stubby flathead screwdriver. There’s a cigarette and something that looks like a joint, a pair of scissors, and an early-COVID-era cloth mask. There’s a Polaroid picture of a cat sitting in front of some blinds and a white ceramic bull with gilded horn tips. I wonder what connections people make when they see this collection of objects.
When I show What You’ve Got (the sculpture where people trade their stuff for seedballs), the gallery will send me back a box of all the things collected during the duration of the piece. I sift through the “pocket trash” people have traded and begin to build an imagined portrait of the community of people who passed through. I’m gleaning insights from the materials they traded. The final prints I make (What They Had: series) show precise compositions of items selected according to my highly subjective criteria. I look for anomalies within the objects and for things that will be interesting to draw.
It’s been a few years since I made one of these prints. I’m itching to go again.
