Postcards/Time Did Most of The Work Here
Postcards is an ongoing artistic and curatorial research project. It comments on the curation, dissemination, and use of documentation as objects.
I started the postcards project after my master's program. I was trying to make sense of the effect of archives, and the difficulties/gaps that came with writing.
While I was deciphering the ways in which one could represent an archive or a research process digitally (see Digital Dust), I started thinking about the weight of documentation. I see photographs or postcards as image objects. They resonate with an audience both by appealing to personal and collective memories. They draw out a -ness, a physicality. Postcards and photographs have been theorized about extensively. Yet, their particular presence remains inaccessible, escapes words.
This project plays on the fleetingness of nostalgia, my own, and the viewer's .
I wanted the receiver to play with the card, that sense of nostalgia. Run their fingers on the punctures, creases, and ridges I created artificially. Hold them to different light to see how they change. Or try to decipher the hidden words, sentences, meanings I hid on each one.
For this project, I mixed techniques of embroidering, painting plant conservation, and collages. I framed some of my work, glued it on glass, put it in individual envelopes, or scanned it to see what the effects of presentation could have on the value of the object.
I have sent out most of the postcards and photographs to family members, friends, acquaintances, strangers. In exchange I have received letters, money, photographs of the postcards framed or glued on a wall, and most recently a Postcard.
