b h a g . n e t visual and conceptual exchange b h a g . n e t
PRESENT PAST—08 February 2007
A few days ago I gathered and surveyed the materials I have on hand for creating new editions of my line of art assemblages: the steel, copper, and aluminum wire of various guages, the mussel shells, the big and small blocks of asphalt, concrete, or stone. The design of these assemblages consists chiefly in wire strands standing a few feet high, having been wrapped around an anchoring chunk of rock. Thus, a rock base and a protrusion above it. One of the chunks of rock I now held in my hand was different from the others. All the rest were raw scrap gathered from broken ground, street, or sidewalk. This one in the palm of my hand was varnished. I knew it well, I had been staring at this little decoration since the age of five—A genuine souvenir fossil from the Petrified Forrest of Arizona. The small chunk of fossilized wood originally served as the base on which a plastic bison was affixed. Thus, a rock base and a protrusion above it. Is this what I was recreating now in my assemblages these forty years later, this fossilized node of memory?
Today the winds of a dry and frozen February gust outside the ground floor windows. As I sit on my sofa in my one-room Brooklyn apartment, struggling to ward off sleep and stay with the day in what has become a five-week battle with insomnia and topsy-turvy sleep cycles, I listen to the gentle white-noise hiss of steam from the tea kettle on the stove. A hiss of sustaining atmosphere to aid and comfort me in my one-room haven. At age five, during an early brush with bronchitis I suppose, I had stayed the night in a clear plastic oxygen tent, surrounded by my toys and joined for brief visits inside the tent by my mother. (My father must have tended to my older brother and sister at home.) I was sick but safe, a hiss of sustaining atmosphere to aid and comfort me in my one-room haven. No wonder that I can’t get my bearings. My past is present, and the present eludes me.
© 2007 John Clay