The semester has gone by so fast, it’s hard to believe we’re already on the beginning stages of our final book project. I’m playing catch-up this week after an extended trip to NYC and Philadelphia last week– where I attended SPE as an artist lecturer. Anyways, below I’ve broken up my ideas for my book:
FORGET ME NOT STATEMENT
When we die, what happens to our most prized possessions? In the case of an estate sale, a home and its contents, an entire life, is for sale. Anyone can rifle through what once were private spaces—the bedroom closet, the medicine cabinet; even the underwear drawer—nothing is sacred.
An estate sale is a space in transition—no longer inhabited but not yet disassembled and abandoned. Some of the homes are destined to be sold, gutted and remodeled; while others will be pulled down to make room for condos, removing all evidence of what was once there. The setting for this project ranges from turn-of-the-century brownstones to 1950s bungalows, but they housed a generation that was less transitory. Unlike today, where on average families move at least every 10 years, individuals of this era spent their entire adult lives in one home.
There’s a sense of permanence to the spaces I photograph, many of their previous owners were first-time home buyers, who took pride in where they lived. In my exploration of the basements and attics of homes across Chicago and its suburbs, I’ve discovered interiors that have remained unchanged for decades; here several generations entertained at Tiki bars, wallpapered the ceiling of their bathrooms and selected kitchen design schemes of orange and avocado green. The experience of these settings are mediated through memory—of childhood or visits to grandma’s—and through pop culture, reruns of T.V. shows like I Love Lucy and The Brady Bunch. Domestic settings, unlike idealized Hollywood sets that never age, experience the ravages of day-to-day life. The worn surfaces and fading of the once vibrant colors reference the aging of the generation and allude to a presence now absent from these rooms.
At estate sales, treasure seekers encounter once-beloved personal and utilitarian objects that lose their original meaning when stripped of their context. Through my arrangement of the spaces and possessions found in each home, I counteract the impersonal nature of an estate sale and the way it distances us from death. Attention is paid to physical markings of the environment and the accumulation and age of items to help construct a past life and allude to the passage of time. As members of this generation pass away, their personal history becomes commodified; but this project counteracts the disposability of an accumulated life by prolonging the existence of the domestic environment and the items it contains.
BOOK PROJECT STATEMENT
For the past two years I’ve been working on my visual thesis project, “Forget Me Not” that focuses on the interior spaces and environments I find while attending estate sales in the Chicago area. From the start of this project I’d envisioned the end result as a book that would create a narrative structure for my photographs. The book will provide a means of building an environment for my own photographs through the inclusion of family snapshots, written material like letters and journals and words and images from ephemera purchased at the sales like cookbooks, decorating guides and travel brochures that serve as a primary source and voice of the era that links the past to the present. A book also ensures permanence, the evershifting spaces I photograph that are now gone will have the chance to live on as a tangible presence.
IMAGES
More images from my “Forget Me Not” project can be seen online at my website: http://www.leilaniwertens.com Unfortunately I don’t have all the found material/slides scanned yet but will post samples of those to the blog soon.
PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION
I’ll use a flatbed scanner to digitize the physical materials collected from the estate sales (ie vernacular photographs, dried flowers, scrapbook pages). I hope to produce a limited edition artist series of the book and also a more commercial, digital version—for the limited edition I’ll use basic binding techniques and materials like chipboard, glue and thread to create an editioned version of the book. The digitally produced book will be similar in content but will be bound by an on-demand publisher and have a different cover than the limited edition.
Since I’m attempting to incorporate various elements– my own images, found imagery/ephemera and text the end result will not be one large book but several small books that will be united in their size, materials used and overall aesthetic. They will all fit into one larger box/sleeve that will encase them all. For now I envision 3 or 4 of these smaller books (depending on how long it takes to create each one) that will each represent one story/voice/a particular estate sale. I’m still struggling with where my own photographs come into the process– whether they should be separated into one of the small books or integrated into the 3 books. If I separated my photo project into its own book I’d make a different aesthetic choice with the cover/fonts/colours used to differentiate it from the ‘source material’ and to emphasize the difference in past vs present.
