The poem that is the subject of this box – a steamy summery kind of musing, complete with blueberries, olympics, and humidity – is taken from the Fall 2006 ESOPUS magazine. Even though the poems, written in the ’80s by Vincent Katz, are about a breakup, I found them to be much more immediate, intimate, urgent. Vincent showed these to his father, who drew up some accompanying illustrations. These have nothing to do with the box.

The box itself, as shown here, is incomplete. It was left out on the front lawn of my Vermont neighbors on the Fourth of July, in an effort to get rid of it among the throngs that come each year to join us in celebration of nationhood and community. No one took the box by 4:00pm, so I did. I later came to find out that Ferg (my neighbor) inherited the box from his sister, it having been given to her by their father as an upright means for her to store her dolls dresses. It was the perfect story to encase the collage that I’d been working on.

The collage itself is standard issue: layers of text and images combined with paint, pastel, and other media and sanded repeatedly and treated to build up a lacquering effect. A few surfaces items added to make the depths “pop” a little more – in this case the butterflies. These works are always somewhat automatic: the buzz and flow of the sander as it explores hidden depths, shying away from vivid contrasts and shoving deep through overly dense areas of paint, searching for textures to reveal. The imagery isn’t entirly arbitray, though it has artifactual qualities: two eyes but no nose. Does it matter? No, the meta themes are intact, all hovering around the livid discoveries of adolescence.

What remains is something to hang, or to place, within the box. The collage presents the backdrop to the story; what will be its subjects, the characters given meaning by their only visible reference points?