My found object was a carefully clipped book review from a newspaper. The clip had no mention of the specific newspaper it came from, no mention of date (except an ad on the back that mentioned Valentine’s Day) and was somewhat tattered from being in the street.
One of the reactions I had to the piece of paper was a sense of memory and loss. Obviously, someone had lost this clip that, at one time, s/he found important enough to cut from the newspaper. Beyond that, though, it just seemed of a different time. After all, who still cuts clips from a printed newspaper?
After a small amount of research, my sense of memory and loss deepened. It turns out the book review appeared in the Los Angeles Times more than 12 years ago. And the author of the piece died almost five years ago.
This sense of memory and loss reminded me a great deal of my experience after my grandfather’s death, which happened a couple of weeks ago. I traveled back to my hometown for the funeral and spent an afternoon and evening at his house. While there, I thought a lot about memories I had consciously or subconsciously discarded. I thought about things that were important once and not so important now. And, of course, I thought about death and loss.
So … for my public art installation, here’s what I plan to do. I would like to install a small number of photographs from my trip to my grandfather’s funeral in either one spot or a few spots around the city. These will be obvious tourist spots because I want to position them in a place/places where people are making their own memories and taking their own snapshots. My goal with this is to have strangers looking at my memories while making their own, perhaps become slightly confused seeing the photos and have their perspective of the city slightly altered because of the encounter. Which is to say, almost exactly the same experience I had after picking up that newspaper clipping Tuesday night.
