Verlust

Here is precursory image of New Guy in his room . . .

I also took some photos of another guy. Let's call him H. H was hastily created for an exhibition that my friend hosted at her house, back in November. He materialized in lieu of what I will refer to as a "Simulacrum of Loss" which, after many frustrating stabs at successful realization, took a morbid nosedive.

Good lord, look at his nostrils.

So...the "Simulacrum of Loss". Towards the end of the summer, I started working on this thing. My level of concern regarding the amount of my own hair that managed to plaster itself to the shower wall after I bathed was at an all-time high, and I was prompted to investigate an old habit: When I was young (Not true; I still do this. However, the facilities in my current house do not permit it.), I would draw images on the shower wall with hair that had fallen out of my scalp in the process of shampooing. Once, I drew my Vice Principal. It was weird, I guess.

I wanted to incorporate this practice into a three-part undertaking, on the subject of my own inclination towards the extraction of meaning from things that are governed entirely by spontaneity. Why does my hair really fall out of my scalp when I wash it?

In August, over the course of ten days, I did ten new hair drawings. Rather, I blindly adhered my hair to the wall with water. The renderings were photographed after each shower.

After that, I made a small book with ten pages. Each page featured a grid. I intended to graph each hair drawing out as accurately as possible with pencil. Then, using ink on tiny overlaying mylar sheets, I planned to highlight select curves, intersecting lines, tangents, etc., that caused the random compositions to resemble recognizable images, such as a chair or, say, an elephant. One of them definitely looks like a tooth.

So much erasing happened that I "temporarily" abandoned that part.

Initially, I had planned to contain all of the components of the project in a small table with a drawer; the photographs of my loose hair would hang above the table in a frame, and the book would be placed on the table's surface. The drawer would accommodate my favorite constituent of the project; after being divided into ten compartments, ten objects derived from the sketches would be placed in the drawer, under glass, like rare insects in a display case. I figured that they would be modified found objects, whose bearing would be even more universal and nonspecific than the ink overlays in the book, thus bringing the intended descent from spontaneity to lucidity to its target, or uh...somewhere in the vicinity.

I wound up with this:

That's when I gave up. Months later, after a lot of rumination, I think that the best way to arrange the elements of the piece would be to situate them in, for the lack of a better term, a spice rack. I'd like to construct a small shelf with a space for the photographs built right into it, along with compartments for the book...and maybe a comb. I'd like to carve the ten universal objects out of soap (preferably pink soap) and delicately house them in ten little chambers, behind glass.

Someday I'll finish it.