the carousel

MFA Thesis Work

This is the only photo that I have of my MFA Thesis work. I do not know how or why either my computer or my camera ate all the pictures I took of this.

The work came to me in a vision. I saw it in a second or third story warehouse room, the kind with concrete floors and divided warehouse windows. A carousel, piled up with junk. Like a jumbled or incomplete memory of a childhood ride that had become neglected and shoved in to a corner of the memory warehouse.

The 10’ platform can rotate, and was meant to rotate in the gallery using a low-torque motor. Drexel Engineering student Mario Leone helped me work out the mechanics of the rotation, but in the end, the platform was too heavy and too unbalanced to be able to turn using the motor. It was a terrible failure.

Stuff is useful things. Junk is unuseful. Shit is the stuff that you want or need but is in somebody’s way. (Maybe your own.) Things are objects yet to be junk or stuff. Trash is discarded stuff or junk. Garbage is the things that break down.

But just because I found it doesn’t make it good, or because its free (but that’s usually the best kind of stuff) or because you gave it to me (but I always appreciate the offer).

I would imagine that things are possessions, but it is really the once possessed or dispossessed that interest me most.