The Book of Mummy

33,259 photos in my camera roll at the moment. consists of mostly of photos taken from 2022 to present. i sat down with the intention of going over a year in photos. when i got back to this day in 2024 i scrolled back in time a few days, then forward some, and quickly became overwhelmed. put this all into a story? impossible. it is too tangential, too many eddies, undercurrents. i would need so much more computational power and emotional endurance than i have access too. I see so many photos i never shared, so many great ones in there. And theyre all attached to different threads of ideas and moments, many of which, though simultaneous, are disparate. When i so seldomly and suddenly decide to look over my shoulder, like on a birthday’s eve such as this, i shudder at the imensity. impossible to try to recapitulate, reorganize, regurgitate, re-present. Yet the urge persists. Look at all i’ve seen! All that i didn’t show you in the moment, all that i kept to myself, all that we could have seen together. I need you to help me look at it now. the future is a vantage from which to see things: hold it a little farther from your face and it’ll come into focus. Things that seemed salient then, don’t now. The raw material moves me more from here, more than how it did when i processed it then. And yet that’s only because i now see another use for it, another way to process it, a process itself i might repeat next year, seeing a “better” way for it then, too, again. Let me not get trapped in these bogs of (active non-)thought— they convey nothing, preserve nothing. But this is an exhumation, nevertheless. an excavation, some archeological gesture or another. Look at all i’ve seen, share it with me, i want to share it with you. I shouldn’t let it pile up. I ought to let things fly out as they happen, without explanation, or without becoming overwhelmed by my own metadata and context. Posting the deli cat was both a personal joke about the imensity of all i’ve seen and collected, a laugh in the face of the impossibility of sharing the important things, as well as a gesture of good faith in the importance of sharing things at all, and having somewhere to put it where people can see it, so they can take what they can, and leave what they will. Part of the fear is the accumulation of filth. Though I act as a sieve, I can’t sift through it for you. It’s there for you to mine though, and i trust in your ability to take what you need, to find the gems, to use what nourishes you. And i should be able to trust my own filter, but don’t always. Just to do it, regardless of high promises, that must be the trick. I’m reminded of some of the platonic baggage in my implicit commitment to (classical) ideals, even those hidden in revolutionary ideologies, like bauhaus for instance. But this is an unreal worry, so let me not prate on about all that. Good design should enhance the lives of others, and there’s no need to capitalize any of those words. Just assume none of my words are capitalized, even if they are. It is neither an intellectual nor a material affair, but simply an integral part of the stuff of life, a necessity. JUST ASSUME THAT IT IS GOOD AND NECCESSARY. And never look for proof, for neither confirmation or otherwise; there’s no use, for you’ll never find any proof of anything but the activity itself; that’s the switch from proof to evidence. what is important is just to do the thing, show it (as it happens), and that’s it. The real work is the activity, but the work you see is the record of activity, thus the work becomes the trail left in my wake (turbulence), the refuse,  (fools)good, lusterless, shiny, value implicit, value no matter. It's my life / It never ends (it never ends). records of moments diffuse with formal questions, extensions of surfaces and their depths. succumbing to the picturesque like a guilty pleasure, in any traditional medium like landscapes (pictures of barns and fields upstate), portraiture (which i did a fair amount of this year, collecting and analyizing influences examples, absorbing practical education, getting my own experience. This has been an unexpected interest of mine, though it has been there. I did a monotype of a female face for a printmaking class at CCC&TI around 2015 and i never let go of that feeling. But for me ultimately its another exercise in looking, analysizing a surface, and participating in a tradition; doing it just to say i can. My aspirations as an artist are totalizing in scope, with an aggressive competitive urge; my attitude; there’s nothing i cannot do. And part of the demand has been to examine and relinquish conventional linguistic sense making strategies. At worst, this has cost me some real thinking. At it’s best, it has opened the way. resisting the lapse into automatism and dealing with what’s there, rather than my idea of what is there. Bracketing the ruse of immediacy, diverting large streams by digging small channels, at times with the fervor of a border collie. words as a corrosive force, susceptible to corrosion themselves.