Collections

Pop Tart Art made the front page of my college paper.
Clearly a slow news day. (2003)

It would be impossible to talk about my work without touching on my penchant for collecting. Each of my projects involves amassing material to some degree and honestly may often be the chief reason of their existence.

Over the years I have collected many things for many reasons and sometimes no reason.

I have been a collector for as long as I can remember. To paraphrase my a saying of my grandmother I “come by [collecting] naturally.”

Stopping short of calling them hoarders, my grandparents had a lot of stuff. Their house was brimming with decades of clothes, records, photographs, papers, and mountains of ephemera. I spend lots of time at their house and they gave me free reign to comb through everything. The garage, basement, and every closet was filled floor to ceiling with boxes to be excavated, detailed, and organized. Left to my own devices for hours I was like an explorer with my expedition being a split level at the end of a cul-de-sac.

My grandparents let me keep many long buried items (unsent postcards from annual vacation spot of Cape May, New Jersey; 70s pamphlets on talking to your teenager about drugs; paper ephemera from my grandfather’s career as a health inspector to name a but a few). I made some familial discoveries as well including the mystery of my grandmother’s quasi-estrangement from her brother and that my mother was briefly married before my father.

Without any real friends in my youth as well as being an only child until my teens left me often quite lonely. Bouncing back and forth between divorced parents living on opposite ends of the country added a sense of feeling adrift. Collecting, amassing, and organizing whatever brought order to a childhood that was otherwise chaotic. Being surrounded by stuff insulated me from all aspects of my life that I had no control over. Ironically I’m assuredly not alone in this feeling. No doubt this is many a collectors origin story.

Below are examples of some things I’ve collected over the years along with pages to some deeper dives because collecting is also a compulsion and I can’t help myself.