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 26, 2011 – The Carr Family Vacation

I never met the Carr Family, but I do know that 50 years ago they took a month long trip around the Mediterranean. In 1996 I bought a large scrapbook/album at a yard sale on Page Street that documented their adventure. It made me sad to see the album so casually discarded. It was clearly a labor of love. I took it as a mission to rescue it for $10. The album had already been cannibalized. Every personal photo had been removed, only the hand written captions remained giving me a clue to what was missing.

The album did have the carefully typed and detailed itinerary created by a travel agent. There were maps, boarding passes, ticket stubs from tours, museums and nightclubs. Menus, matchbooks, hotel stationary, postcards and all sorts of ephemera that I also love to accumulate when I travel.

What I do know is that at the beginning of August 1961, Mr. and Mrs. John F. Carr Jr. their daughter Joyce and son John Carr III set out from Cambridge, Mass. for Madrid, then to Rome, Greece, Israel and Jordan. The return had them visiting Egypt and then Lisbon before returning to the U.S. All this accomplished in a little over a month. As all the family photos were removed, I have no idea what they looked like. It’s clear from the hand written captions that the son John put the album together. Over the years it has been a great source of material in my own mixed media work and it gets remembered again in my piece for today.