I should've prepared for you guys more.
Things are a little unruly.
--Yeah, right on the...
--In the same line, right here.
I have this keen interest in
not just autonomous, singular objects,
but whole collections of things.
Part of the reason I think I'm attracted to collections
is because they constitute one person's--
or one institution's--
way of seeing the world.
And it's like this little time capsule
of things that were important to someone.
And so, I spend a lot of time
looking for the personality of people within their collections.
And then maybe even trying to tease out, in a collection,
why those things are important.
So the first collection that I received is Prairie Avenue Bookstore,
which was a architectural history bookstore
in Downtown Chicago.
The second collection I purchased was Dr. Wax.
It was a record store in Hyde Park,
which is a neighborhood on the South Side.
I don't know how many albums...
Six thousand.
Eight thousand.
A lot of albums.
And the third collection was the University of Chicago's glass lantern slides.
I'm using the glass slides to teach art history sometimes.
Sometimes I include them as part of works of art,
or they become the works of art themselves--
in the case of the Jet magazines.
I've taken an amazing canon of Johnson Publishing magazines.
This is Jet magazine.
We had about twelve thousand unbound periodicals.
I had been binding them and color coding them by decade.
It's exciting, this body of work,
because it gets to ask questions about monochrome painting.
When they're functioning as a monochrome painting,
they're not necessarily functioning like an archive.
But, in fact, my hope is that
the history and the content that's loaded inside the books
will be waiting for people to unearth it.
As the magazine, it was making the work of the present.
It wasn't attempting to make an archive.
But it's so amazing that these bound volumes constitute the 1990s.
And it's a very particular 1990s Black-American experience.
And I feel really fortunate to have been able to bind these things
and then to make them present in the world again.
Right now, we're working on archiving this hardware store.
The hardware store was, again, kind of like Dr. Wax.
This amazing guy, Ken, had owned it for thirty years
and he was retiring.
We loved his building,
but we loved the stuff.
And so, we bought the entire hardware store.
In changing neighborhoods,
poor neighborhoods,
neighborhoods where a big box like Home Depot might move in,
what do you do with Ken's legacy?
How do you catalog the everyday,
especially as the phenomena of the everyday is changing?
And is this another way of tracking Black space?
Black, not necessarily just about Black people,
but about forgotten people.
It's a space where things have stopped growing.
And then maybe it's also, like, the void.
Like, resources go in,
and you're not sure where they go.
Black space.
Like...
Galactic space.
These are the things that I'm working with.
I'm having a lot of fun looking at these objects
both as sculptural objects
and as objects that have the potential to create new sculptural works.
It's the thing,
and it's the thing that makes the thing.