Yard Sailing - 2018
     On Saturday mornings Ellen and I navigate North Fork yard sales. They are a whirlpool of fascinating detritus that inspire awe and amazement. I always discover something that I never knew I wanted or needed but for a dollar must have. Like John Cage’s chance operations or surrealist art inspired by dreams, yard sales curate objects in seemingly inappropriate arrangements providing ideas and materials for my work. 
      I am an archaeologist artist. I search, excavate, catalog and re-imagine. I look at now historically.   In 1971 BCE (before the computer era) I studied the research Andy Warhol carried out in the 60’s. I too became interested in expanding public access to high culture. I explored ways to place art into the built environment. Influenced by Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction and Andre Malraux’s Museum Without Walls, I photographed vending machines and photographed the art galleries in the Rhode Island School of Design Museum. Using number 11 Xacto knife blades, I cut out the paintings, extracted them from the gallery walls and pasted them into vending machine images.  I pasted the art filled vending machines into a photograph of Thayer Street and inside the Providence train station.  This “virtual”, photo based, hypothetical project caught the attention of an English design magazine and subsequently the government of South Africa requested a price list so that they could distribute these non-existent vending machines throughout Johannesburg.
     At 22 years of age, I was not interested in permanence and archival issues were furthest from my mind. These rubber cemented photo-montages deteriorated. In Painting Vendor, the Georges Braque fell and from A Revival of Prints, an Albrecht Durer delaminated. Frank Stella separated from Artist at Work vender, and Auguste Rodin’s Balzac fell. The pages yellowed and wrinkled. I wrinkled, my hair fell, and my hearing faded. I reconstructed these photomontages from the catalog titled Proposal for Rhode Island School of Design Mechanical Museum Expansion Program using Photoshop. 
     This method of juxtaposition, cutting and pasting; band saw or number 11 Xacto knife or Photoshop, helps me to understand the everyday, to break thru preconceptions about the way things should look and to imagine how the world could be.