I don’t recall when it was that I first understood “love” to be a verb, but I remember it setting in for me during my senior year of high school. During that weird final month of school when I’d already made my deposit for college and started thinking about my life beyond my hometown in any serious way, I read All About Love by bell hooks. This is not about that book or about Sister hooks or even about high school. But I often need to remind myself to live. As a verb. and Love. As a verb.
The biggest thing I’ve been working on lately is bridging the gap between idea and execution. It is easy to want things. It is less easy to do them and be the person you imagine yourself to be.
I recently opened a photo exhibition in DC. I had an idea for a show, many a scribble in my notebook about how it would look put up, and the contact information for a curator in my hometown. As a kid, I went to many an opening. Several of which were in this particular space in its multiple iterations with my parent’s names on the wall. I love gallery openings. I love seeing things on walls far more than I enjoy scrolling past them online. I love talking to artists about their work and to other patrons about the work and our feelings about it. I have spent many years imagining what it would be like to have my art and my name on a gallery wall. As of last week, I know it feels both like an end and like a beginning. There’s a relief that comes with finishing a project of this scale and an anxiety over its reception. But there is also this underlying need to chase this particular high again. To make more art, better art. To be able to look back on this as the first time I had my work in real gallery and maybe cringe a bit at the way it turned out.
I understand this phase of my life to be Proof of Concept. I graduated college, which proves that all of the anxieties I had about that particular goal were valid but ultimately conquerable. I wanted my work in gallery, so I called my friend and asked him to put some work in a folder so I could put it in a proposal. And now our work is up in this gallery. Concept = proven. These are things I can do. I have always been able to do them and am still able to do these things better. But I have evidence — for myself, no one else — that it only takes doing.
After mounting the show, someone asked me why I invited my friend to show work instead of doing a solo show. At first, my answer was that I didn’t feel I deserved a solo show immediately out of school when I haven’t been creating work all through school. The person who asked was being kinda shady, truthfully, but it is because he didn’t see my vision. He didn’t understand that it isn’t necessarily about my confidence in my work to stand alone — it will do that whether I think it does or not. I was testing myself, proving yet another concept. It’s one thing to look at your own work and say that it fits this theme and tells this story and looks great on the wall. It is another thing entirely to have a concept and put together work from different artists with different styles to then tell a cohesive story and make it all look good. But that’s what I did. And, to prove concept, I did it with a very good friend of mine. Because I can fail in front of him. Because I know his work and know he deserves many shows in many galleries and I wouldn’t mind being able to say that I was part of one of his first shows. It’s also no fun to do things alone. What fun is it to “me me me” your way through a show that’s all about how much I love other people?
On the note of putting together a show about the people I love, some of the photos were sourced from my mom’s photo albums and the shoeboxes of photos I keep in my childhood bedroom. While going through the family albums has always been one of my favorite forms of entertainment, flipping through my personal collection meant a lot more. Being able to see the things I chose to print out so I could hold in my hands. There are photos in those boxes of people I talk to almost every day now and people I only knew for a night or two. Most of the photos in those boxes are from high school and it hurt to see those faces again. To be reminded of the person I was then and the people I had around me. I say it hurt not because it was all bad — there were a lot of really lovely moments that I still hold dear— but because that life is so far away from me now for reasons greater than time alone and the reminder of that will always knock the wind out of me. I do, though, enjoy the work of building a record of my current life.
I wonder how it will feel to look back at the photos from this life. I wonder what other proof of I will have.
This week’s…
book: Cat’s Cradle - Kurt Vonnegut
tv: The Bear season 4, Gossip Girl (2007) rewatch
attempt at aliveness: doing everything I said I would do
refrain: “I try to let / whatever has to pass through me pass through / but this is staying a while, I know / it might not let me go”- What Was That- Lorde