WEBVTT 00:00:18.580 --> 00:00:21.500 I should've prepared for you guys more. 00:00:22.360 --> 00:00:23.860 Things are a little unruly. 00:00:25.240 --> 00:00:26.220 --Yeah, right on the... 00:00:26.220 --> 00:00:28.060 --In the same line, right here. 00:00:28.280 --> 00:00:31.249 I have this keen interest in 00:00:31.249 --> 00:00:35.350 not just autonomous, singular objects, 00:00:35.350 --> 00:00:37.400 but whole collections of things. 00:00:39.660 --> 00:00:42.680 Part of the reason I think I'm attracted to collections 00:00:42.680 --> 00:00:45.839 is because they constitute one person's-- 00:00:45.839 --> 00:00:47.159 or one institution's-- 00:00:47.159 --> 00:00:49.030 way of seeing the world. 00:00:49.030 --> 00:00:52.149 And it's like this little time capsule 00:00:52.149 --> 00:00:53.989 of things that were important to someone. 00:00:53.989 --> 00:00:56.430 And so, I spend a lot of time 00:00:56.430 --> 00:01:00.960 looking for the personality of people within their collections. 00:01:00.960 --> 00:01:04.059 And then maybe even trying to tease out, in a collection, 00:01:04.060 --> 00:01:05.960 why those things are important. 00:01:09.620 --> 00:01:13.120 So the first collection that I received is Prairie Avenue Bookstore, 00:01:13.120 --> 00:01:16.240 which was a architectural history bookstore 00:01:16.240 --> 00:01:18.020 in Downtown Chicago. 00:01:18.500 --> 00:01:22.460 The second collection I purchased was Dr. Wax. 00:01:23.400 --> 00:01:25.500 It was a record store in Hyde Park, 00:01:25.500 --> 00:01:27.940 which is a neighborhood on the South Side. 00:01:28.720 --> 00:01:30.280 I don't know how many albums... 00:01:31.040 --> 00:01:32.039 Six thousand. 00:01:32.039 --> 00:01:33.039 Eight thousand. 00:01:33.040 --> 00:01:34.040 A lot of albums. 00:01:34.100 --> 00:01:38.440 And the third collection was the University of Chicago's glass lantern slides. 00:01:38.900 --> 00:01:42.659 I'm using the glass slides to teach art history sometimes. 00:01:42.659 --> 00:01:45.590 Sometimes I include them as part of works of art, 00:01:45.590 --> 00:01:47.649 or they become the works of art themselves-- 00:01:47.649 --> 00:01:50.200 in the case of the Jet magazines. 00:01:51.680 --> 00:01:57.020 I've taken an amazing canon of Johnson Publishing magazines. 00:01:57.020 --> 00:01:58.900 This is Jet magazine. 00:02:00.100 --> 00:02:03.960 We had about twelve thousand unbound periodicals. 00:02:06.680 --> 00:02:11.140 I had been binding them and color coding them by decade. 00:02:12.520 --> 00:02:14.140 It's exciting, this body of work, 00:02:14.140 --> 00:02:18.580 because it gets to ask questions about monochrome painting. 00:02:19.590 --> 00:02:21.900 When they're functioning as a monochrome painting, 00:02:21.900 --> 00:02:25.110 they're not necessarily functioning like an archive. 00:02:25.400 --> 00:02:27.840 But, in fact, my hope is that 00:02:27.840 --> 00:02:31.400 the history and the content that's loaded inside the books 00:02:31.400 --> 00:02:34.480 will be waiting for people to unearth it. 00:02:36.940 --> 00:02:40.660 As the magazine, it was making the work of the present. 00:02:40.660 --> 00:02:42.980 It wasn't attempting to make an archive. 00:02:43.440 --> 00:02:48.080 But it's so amazing that these bound volumes constitute the 1990s. 00:02:48.520 --> 00:02:52.960 And it's a very particular 1990s Black-American experience. 00:02:52.969 --> 00:02:57.920 And I feel really fortunate to have been able to bind these things 00:02:57.920 --> 00:03:00.640 and then to make them present in the world again. 00:03:06.100 --> 00:03:10.440 Right now, we're working on archiving this hardware store. 00:03:10.840 --> 00:03:13.900 The hardware store was, again, kind of like Dr. Wax. 00:03:14.740 --> 00:03:18.099 This amazing guy, Ken, had owned it for thirty years 00:03:18.100 --> 00:03:19.900 and he was retiring. 00:03:20.909 --> 00:03:21.900 We loved his building, 00:03:21.909 --> 00:03:23.130 but we loved the stuff. 00:03:23.130 --> 00:03:26.480 And so, we bought the entire hardware store. 00:03:30.360 --> 00:03:32.040 In changing neighborhoods, 00:03:32.040 --> 00:03:33.340 poor neighborhoods, 00:03:33.360 --> 00:03:36.720 neighborhoods where a big box like Home Depot might move in, 00:03:36.720 --> 00:03:40.240 what do you do with Ken's legacy? 00:03:41.109 --> 00:03:43.320 How do you catalog the everyday, 00:03:43.330 --> 00:03:46.310 especially as the phenomena of the everyday is changing? 00:03:46.310 --> 00:03:51.060 And is this another way of tracking Black space? 00:03:52.460 --> 00:03:56.280 Black, not necessarily just about Black people, 00:03:56.280 --> 00:03:58.100 but about forgotten people. 00:03:58.510 --> 00:04:03.080 It's a space where things have stopped growing. 00:04:03.080 --> 00:04:06.800 And then maybe it's also, like, the void. 00:04:08.280 --> 00:04:10.400 Like, resources go in, 00:04:10.400 --> 00:04:12.680 and you're not sure where they go. 00:04:13.200 --> 00:04:13.960 Black space. 00:04:14.340 --> 00:04:14.840 Like... 00:04:16.380 --> 00:04:17.660 Galactic space. 00:04:20.580 --> 00:04:22.400 These are the things that I'm working with. 00:04:23.500 --> 00:04:26.130 I'm having a lot of fun looking at these objects 00:04:26.130 --> 00:04:28.190 both as sculptural objects 00:04:28.190 --> 00:04:32.290 and as objects that have the potential to create new sculptural works. 00:04:32.290 --> 00:04:33.360 It's the thing, 00:04:33.360 --> 00:04:34.940 and it's the thing that makes the thing.