Synergy
Synergy Library Card/Newspaper Project:
Reading books and newspapers have always been a very important part of my life. In this project I make associations between the past and the present and collect old, library cards from card catalogues that I pair with clippings from my daily newspaper reading. I recycle the cards from the library book catalogues and use them to hold new, and in my mind, related information. Essentially I am creating new catalogues from old ones and finding a way to file bits of newspaper text that I discover. I do approximately one "new" card a day. The cards on the wall in my recent installation for Pages: Book as Medium, Catalyst, Venue at the Paragraph Gallery in Kansas City are all from 2010.
Of course I haven't read most of the books from the catalogue cards, so I am working with assumptions that I make about what I appropriate as well as acknowledging the limitations of my base of knowledge. However, the associations that arise between my current clippings and the old book catalogue cards mirror the way the process of remembering works as old thoughts are mixed with newly imagined interpretations. The aggregation of material also mimics the nature of memory and how we store information.
This exercise is both challenging and meditative. It requires that I open myself to connections and capture them within the confines of this process. I enjoy reading both book titles and newspaper clippings as well as the tactile experience of handling the cards and the newspapers. and I take visual pleasure looking at the typeface, the variation of the color, text and marks on the cards.