Clearing Out

Regular readers here know that much of my life over the past year has been consumed with moving from one house to another.   The end is within sight on the effort to empty out the old family home in North Jersey.  Most of my stuff is gone, but today I went up to take care of some stored art.  The largest  project that I ever attempted was my Fourth of July series, a woodcut for each day for a year.  The whole set is up on the web for those who are interested.  I have shown the whole series three times since completing it in 1994.  The first time was a college exchange exhibition at University of Illinois.  I was given a large brick wall and decided the best way to use it would be to mount the prints on large pieces of foam core, stuck to the wall with double sided sticky tape.  Using the foam core worked to my advantage when I arrived to find that my wall had thermostats, electric outlet boxes, and other obstacles permanently attached, and I had to cut parts out of my foam core panels to get them to fit on the wall.  Unfortunately, the panels started falling off the wall before the show was over (the gallery added more sticky tape) and they didn't look that great in general.

I had almost a year after that to prepare to show the piece again in my MFA show.  This time I went with a prefabricated wood structure- lauan plywood mounted on a frame of 1" x 2" lumber.  The wood was painted white before I attached the prints with linen tape hinges.  Predrilled holes in the frames allowed me to connect it all together with bolts in the museum gallery.  The four panels combined to make one large 9' by 15' piece, which took 5 people to lift up and hang on the wall.  A lot of work for a one week exhibition, but if definitely looked much better than the earlier effort.  I took it off the wall, wrapped the four panels in brown kraft paper and brought them back to my studio space at the Glove Factory.  A few weeks later I loaded them into a moving van and brought them back to my parents' house, where they've been in the basement, waiting for the next show.

Because of the difficulty in moving them and in finding a wall large enough to hold the whole piece, they've stayed there.  (My third showing of the series involved attaching the first proofs of the prints directly to the wall with pushpins, for a show at Kean University in 2005. )   I have no place to store them, but don't want to see all those prints go to waste, so today I went up there to remove them from the wood panels.  A quick inspection a few months back showed that the prints looked ok despite the less than archival conditions of the past 17 years, so I dragged them out one at a time, tore off the paper, and carefully pulled them off in order.  Above is one of the panels at the start, below with one and half rows removed.

The whole process took almost 3 hours, but that included the struggle to move the panels around the cluttered, low ceilinged basement.  But in the end, the prints were preserved (three have slight water stains and will need to be reprinted) and the wood panels moved to the garage for eventual disposal.  I have no immediate plans to show the series, but I'm always looking for an opportunity.