Notes for Artists
2011

Text, over 400 unique posters ca. A1 size, marker, ink, rubber bands, push pins

Kunstakademiet, KHiO (Oslo National Academy of the Arts) 2011
Naturhistorisk museum (Oslo) 2012 ← spoken performance
Black Box Teater (Oslo) 2012
Superclub (Edinburgh) 2012

A work consisting of 400 unique handwritten A1 size posters based on furiously jotted down notes from my first semester of attending the art academy in Oslo for my MFA. Freshly arrived from New York City, Oslo and its art scene was still a peculiar place for me. The texts on the posters were short, poetic, and often contradictory.

Visitors to the piece were encouraged to help recombine the texts by taking one home for themselves. This gesture was meant both as an attempt to create something new and to help clean up the physical manifestation of a scattered mind.

When the posters were hung randomly side by side in the gallery space, new and constantly changing trains of thought, odd poems emerged, crested, and disappeared. Rapid change was both potent and palpable, as the audience constantly removed and replaced the texts on the wall. The room would be heavy and solemn one minute, light and humorous the next.

Though only exhibited for three days at the art academy and one evening at the Black Box Theater in Oslo, these posters spread like wildfire in the local scene. I have since learned that some of these posters have ended up taped to windows in studio collectives, framed in private homes, and have even ended up in private "proper" art collections.

One text was even borrowed by a music student and used as the title for their final project: Feeling sad about the past and unable to articulate the future.

Multiples that are superficially "worthless" often have an uncanny natural ability to lie dormant as physical reminders, waiting to be rediscovered. Sometimes for years. Once rediscovered, they become reactivated and read in relation to their surroundings and context. And what is worth, anyway?