Recollection: Life on Record
INSTALLATION
When a record makes its way from a garage sale or shop crate onto someone’s shelves, it brings with it an entire archive of memories and a web of connections. These remnants of life build up like sediments on the object, though they may be obfuscated by an owner or listener’s inability to attune to their presence and the ways they color the record’s sound and surfaces. What is lost, then, is the broader patchwork of meanings intrinsic to this record. This exhibition, entitled Recollection: Life on Record seeks to piece it together.
Taking a second hand copy of the record Aja by Steely Dan from my own shelves, Recollection: Life on Record recreates the listening space of one of the record’s previous owners. Exhibition visitors will listen to Side A of this record just as he did in a recreation of the environment in which he listened, opening up new linkages to a previous life embedded in the record through his material and sensory world. In resituating this copy of Aja in this way, this exhibition seeks to attune visitors to fragments of life in objects more broadly while providing a sensory model to access some of them.
TABS
BOOK
The idea for this book, or whatever it’s best described as, came about in the spring of 2022 when I got an alert on my iPhone: “You have 500 tabs open, and 467 older than one month. To open more you will need to close some tabs.
So I went back to my first open tab and realized that this set of 500 tabs spanned nearly two years of searches – terms from grad school seminars I probably should’ve understood but still didn’t, recipes and measurement equivalencies, film and music reviews, baseball box scores, and lots of tabs devoted to people and things I wanted to know more about.
In sifting through these tabs, I’ve also found an archive that has tracked my thinking, interests, habits, attempted hobbies, and physical locations. Better still, the record these tabs hold has been able to color the last two years in a uniquely vibrant way – similarly, I imagine, to the way a journal would if I had the patience to keep one. Instead, I have these digital entries of a log I never knew I was keeping. The contents of this book are just a handful of those I found most interesting, personally significant, or enduring. I hope you find something worthwhile in here, too.
EXHIBITION
Rethinking Legacy and Memory: Behind the Image of Ulysses S. Grant
The titles of “General” and “President” have dominated the history of Ulysses S. Grant. However, these heroic labels leave facets of his life unexplored. By examining the private collection donated to George Washington University by his grandson, Ulysses S. Grant III, this exhibit illuminates Grant’s life inside and outside the public eye, and in the spaces in between.