Old Friends

    There is a odd occurrence in the art world that I never get used to.  It is getting work back from shows that have been up or traveling for some time.  This in combination with the natural tenancy for us as people to fill spaces complicates life sometimes. 
    I remember being in between college and Graduate school and having these same feeling about all of my belongings. I graduated in the Fall after staying an extra semester so I sent out my graduate applications and moved to Washington DC from Florida. 
Not knowing where or if I would be going to graduate school, I loaded everything I owned into a
storage unit before leaving for DC.  After being in DC for 9 months I looked at all I had accumulated and I thought "what do I have in storage that I need?"  I was hoping the storage facility would have some natural disaster or my unit would burn to the ground and I would just get a check in the mail. I had the hardest time remebering what I even had in there and why it was so important to store.  But after opening the door to the unit I, for some reason, had a hard time throwing things away when 2 seconds earlier I would have taken a c
heck for it all and wouldnt have cared. 
     On Saturday I deinstalledtwo shows in Louisville and Installed one in Indiana.  The work from Louisville has been gone since May moving from venue to venue.  I had to write down what work I was supposed to retrieve because I could barley remember all that they had.  After seeing all it was like seeing old friends, but things have changed since they have been gone and I have to find room for them in my life again.  The one that I am so curious about is a piece that has been in a traveling exhibition for the past 3 years.  When I made it Holly and I didn't have any children, when it is at one of its last stops it will be in Murray KY and Holly and I will go and Olive (our Daughter) will WALK into the venue. That is crazy.  I am curious to see this event and I wonder if I feel that it will still hold up as a accurate representation of my work. 
    For many there is a constant need in our lives for memory impregnated objects.  For many there is a need to fill whatever space they are given.  I think back often on the work of David Ireland and his defining of spacial relationships to the personal.  He once talked about with any space you inhabit you must first deinstall a previous owner to install yourself.  I think back on my "nomadic" Childhood in a military family.  As of this summer Georgetown is the longest place I have ever lived.  I moved 16 times before I was 25.  My whole life has consisted of getting into a new space, repaint, rehang, figure out floor plans.  I find it funny that in my professional life I seem to do this on a regular basis as well.