Image / Text    |    scrap/book/yard

For several years I have been collecting bits of text, culled from poems and prose, radio and live interviews, newspaper clippings, the Internet, as well as my own writing. I have also begun listening, noting, and collecting sounds in much the same manner. Intrigued by notions of categorization, and the implicit assumptions of hierarchy and value, I began exploring the dual notions of ‘scrap book’ – a container for what gets selectively chosen, preserved, highlighted and archived, often preciously – and at the other edge of the spectrum ‘scrap yard’, a dumping ground for detritus, materials discarded as useless and worthless, buried, or occasionally salvaged and recycled into new forms. Both contexts afford a fascinating and, at times, disturbing inquiry into functionality and meaning, which play a role in personal and social memory. Since everything we remember has an emotional component to it (otherwise we wouldn’t remember it), how we choose to collect, categorize, store, dispose or dispense with anything carries with it the subjective weight of our experience of it. By exposing and reconfiguring the scrap mix, my desire is to disrupt our experience and understanding of it and open up the possibility of sensing different possibilities and priorities.