25 Months Later

During 2011 as I was creating a piece for the 2011 Project every day, I kept adding them to the wall.  Some have been shown during this time, but basically I’ve been looking at them all for the past two years.  But, I haven’t given much thought to many of the individual pieces and the stories I was writing about them every day on the project blog.  This past weekend I was preparing the pieces for distribution by adding an individual label to the back of each one.  As I was going through the pieces from the first months of 2011, it became an unexpected trip back in time to just two years ago.

Just looking at the pieces was like reading a journal – a journal I do not keep.  It took me back to events as the project was getting started.  The time when I had just nine completed and could begin to see what it might look like.  And then when themes started to emerge.  The revolutions brewing in Egypt, North Africa and the Middle East which are still playing out.  There was the horror of massive earthquake in Japan.  The memories of the first time I took my nephew to the desert.  And, there was the beginning of going through my archives of collage fodder and creating the piece shown above that mentions a 25-month subscription.  Here we are 25 months on, imagine what it will be like to look back 25 years later….

January 10, 2011 – Current Life

It’s the time of the year when I give my art supplies a thorough reorganization. It takes more than putting the brushed and paints in order. There are boxes of maps, shelves of old atlases and a few boxes of random scraps of paper. The boxes contain old photos and ephemera. It’s all filed under “collage fodder” in my world. No time for that task today, but I decided to just reach up into a box on a high shelf and blindly use the first piece of paper I pulled out.

It was a renewal card for Life Magazine. I can’t say how old it was, but the card referred to a “postal zone number” instead of a zip code. Zip codes came into use in 1963. The preprinted address on the card read, “San Francisco 2 Cal.” The person lived in the 200 block of Page Street. That’s 94102 nowadays, of course. I immediately can remember where and when I found this. I can’t say the exact date, but it was around 1996. I was walking to work downtown and happened on a box of old greeting cards, postcards, photos and things like this. It was abandoned at the corner of Oak and Octavia under a freeway. The Central Freeway is now only a memory for those of us who have lived in San Francisco for a while. I’ve incorporated many of things I found that morning into collages over the years.