Selections, ebay painting series

Yay

Gesture

Wishes

Say to them: Man has survived hitherto because he was too ignorant to know how to realize his wishes. Now that he can realize them, he must either change them or perish.

William Carlos Williams, from The Orchestra

— I was introduced to this text in the mid 1980’s through Steve Reich’s The Desert Music. You can hear that work on YouTube here, and read the rest of the text and the composer’s notes here.

Statement

The images originate from items for sale on eBay during the years 2000-2007, when ecommerce was a bit raw overall, when the site held a more garage sale vibe, and digital photography was nacent. I fictionalized the objects to some degree to explore how people related to the possessions they put up for sale. Sometimes these were emotionally charged relationships, but they could also be magical, light-hearted, or frightening.

The ways that people relate to things, the stories that are constructed in our minds regarding them, why our stuff is or is not of value to us - these aspects of human behavior reflect one way that we in consumer-driven cultures create meaning for ourselves. Unnecessary things can be meaningful in small ways and variations in the weight of meaning are colored by our inner associations with things. I wanted to explore that with these paintings by making visible -slightly- a mental picture that originates from the consumer who became the seller, in whatever direction that might have taken, from happy to creepy.

eBay was an interesting starting point at the time because it served as a type of reverse mirror of the world’s trade in goods, that seen through the consumer’s perspective rather than the manufacturer’s. Here, the small stories and background information attached to the photograph of the object became stylizing points.

All paintings are uniform in format, either 6” x 4.5” or 4.5” x 6”, about the size of a printed photograph, and were painted between 2000-2010 with etching ink and/or oil on paper mounted on plywood. I made about 300 paintings in the series during that time.

A feature article about the series was published by The Chicago Journal; find it on the About page.