Monthly Statement:
February 2006

OBJECT #24
DATE SENT: February 28, 2006
SENT TO: Nancy Weaver
SENT VIA: US Postal Service

DESCRIPTION OF OBJECT: 3 1/2”x 3 1/2” color photograph, on glossy paper. Colors are yellowed and slightly faded due to exposure to light and environmental deterioration. Photograph shows Nancy Weaver, with sun shining on her face, driving. The car’s interior is barely distinguishable, save front and rear driver’s side windows, which are closed. Front door lock is depressed. The car was a Brown VW Rabbit, approximately 1977 model. A shadow is projected across Nancy’s forehead and she looks as if she is in mid-word or about to laugh. Nancy’s hair is pulled back from her head. Her cross-chest seat belt is securely in place. She is wearing a pair of sunglasses and a dark sweatshirt over a green patterned tropical shirt (which Nancy loaned me for a number of years, until I returned it), the collars of which are sticking out from the sweatshirt. The blurry landscape and a stand of pines on a hill in Upstate New York are visible out the window of the car.

ORIGIN AND APPROXIMATE DATE OF POSSESSION OF OBJECT: Photograph was taken in Nancy’s brown VW Rabbit heading north toward Rochester in January 1979. Photograph was taken by me with a Kodak Instamatic camera. Film was developed in Rochester by a commercial lab. Photograph has been in my possession since then.

MOST RECENT LOCATION OF OBJECT: On top of the desk in my home workroom, 52 Carlton Avenue, Jersey City, NJ. Desk is against east-facing window.

RELATION OF OBJECT TO RECIPIENT: Nancy entered graduate school at the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, NY, in September 1978, the same year I did, even though I had been there for a year taking classes as a non-matriculating student. She was from North Carolina, and her soft southern drawl and relatively low-key demeanor belied an intense intellect and superb artistic talent. I had met Nancy the year before for a brief moment when she came to see the Graduate Thesis Exhibition of Don Myer, who was for a short time my roommate. He presented his exhibition in our shared home which had a large living room. For his show, Don had made huge black and white photographs at Goddard College, which was where Nancy was attending. I don’t remember Nancy from that time, though I am fairly sure that was our first meeting. During her time in Rochester we were relatively good friends and spent time together biking, swimming at the quarry, and going to movies and lectures. I photographed Nancy at other times with this same camera and used it in some of my artwork, but this print was nothing more than a snapshot. Nancy’s own work was eclectic and she used photographic processes, quilting, printmaking and writing with a fluidity and ease that disguised the utter sophistication of her pieces. I always thought that she was one of the few ‘real’ artists I had ever met. After we both finished our program we wound up in the NYC metro area, she living on 21st Street and I in Jersey City. For the time she was here we kept a relationship up, doing many of the same things we had done in grad school, just in a bigger place. We would meet for movies, go to galleries, eat cheap dinners together, and hang around the loft she shared with Jackie Crawford, her friend from North Carolina, and David and Lisa, a couple that I do not know except that they were roommates of Nancy’s. At a certain point Nancy met another David, and eventually they married. I know she moved to Martha’s Vineyard and David worked on a ship as (I believe) a marine biologist. I have not seen nor heard from her for well over fifteen years, but my memories of her are brought forth by this particular image. The day I took it was in January, and I am pretty sure it was 1979, after our winter break from school. I had spent the month in my parents’ home in New Jersey and Nancy drove up from North Carolina to pick me up. She arrived some time during the early afternoon of a cold clear day. We sat for a while in the kitchen, having a cup of tea as my mother worked around the house. It struck me as such an incongruity to have Nancy there, in the home I had grown up in since I was three years old. Nancy was part of my new life, away from New Jersey, away from all my old friends, away from the circumscribed life that can encircle anyone from any part of the country. Our life in graduate school was filled with intellectual discussions, serious art making, negotiating the severity of Upstate New York winters, great dance parties, and a feeling that we were on the pulse and at the forefront of a particularly vital time in image making and thinking. Whether true or not, most all of us felt it, and I certainly felt privileged to be among this group who came from all over the country to study the significance of visual culture. As we sat in the kitchen, it struck me that my life at home was surely over now, and even though I would return to New Jersey it never had the same concerns. We left soon, and headed north and west, luckily avoiding any of the consistent snowstorms that had often plagued my trips to Rochester. At some point, I took this picture as Nancy was driving and before the fleeting light of mid winter was gone. The interior of the car was filled with the yellow glow, the hum of tires on the road may have been the only sound – Nancy and I would spend long stretches of time together comfortably quiet – and I snapped (the absolute right phrase for this action) her picture. There is no compositional concern, no meaning psychological, sociological, or cultural, no aesthetic intent or result. What I have, and have had for all the years this picture has been in my possession, is the record of a moment, which leads me to the sweet ruminations concerning a friendship and a time in my life that was so far superior than any I had ever dreamed for myself. My sincere wish is that this photo finds its way to Nancy (the address I have is old and I am less than certain about its currency) and her own memories will be informed by it as well.

RESPONSE OF RECIPIENT:

DATE OF RESPONSE:

Process: My plan is to de-accumulate objects I now own during the course of the exhibition year. I will photograph the selected object then send the object with a letter to a person who has some relationship to the object or whom I think might be interested in the object. The letter will discuss the project and tell the receiver they can keep the object, destroy it, give it away, recycle it or anything else they choose. I will ask them to document it in the place they now have it and send their image and/or written description back to me of what they did with it and where it is. I plan on de-accumulating an average of one object per week. The new images/descriptions will be placed in a plastic folder and exhibited along with a photograph of the object as it was in my possession.