"Unfinished Business" - Postcard Collective Summer 2016

Keys to previous places called "home" are on my mind. I searched the archives and found an image for a set that stares me down from a plastic bag day after day.

This is leading somewhere ... I promise.

Autobiography: Hair & Keys to Annie's House, New Zealand

1985 & 1997


2005

To Florence & My Very Odd Hotel Room

There was a lot of waiting for my train platform number to appear on the board in Venice most of the late morning. Amazingly with the six train trips in Italy, each and every time it featured a board like this, my train was the last to post usually at the five minute departure point. Stressful!



I finally made it to my Florence hotel in the late afternoon - it was very hot and humid and I would spend the rest of my trip here dodging rainstorms and intense sunshine. My Room without a View:



...that proved to be excellent people watching for the duration of my stay.



Surprisingly this was a hotel room without artwork. I kept trying to justify the chandelier as an installation piece...



...but ultimately decided on covering up the mirror.



The most gaudy bedspread in the entire country proved to be an ideal "artwork" cover:



When removing the bedspread and readjusting the mirror, I discovered an inoperable safe!



That was just the beginning of the bizarre things that would take place in this hotel. One day a key appeared for 48 hours on the bedside table. I didn't touch it, shocked that another key would appear in my life after returning Braydee's earlier this summer.



Once I finally decided I was going to take it, it disappeared...



... only to be replaced by a pair of cleaning gloves left on top of my suitcase.



Once again this was ironic because I had thrown my three remaining clear water sample gloves in the top of my bag on the way out the door that day.



No such luck hanging money from curtains in this hotel. It looks like they were once there but sadly, no longer.

VB Assignment: Braydee's Key

VB Assignment: The every single factor ... in the manner of Ed Ruscha and John Baldessari... Photograph every doughnut and swimming pool I see and try Braydee’s key at every place I am staying.

My quest to find home in California with Braydee's key ended in failure (as most things I tried last month were bound to do).* Before the trip, I thought about sending her key off in a grand fashion - hurling it into the sea or building it a small styrofoam pie to float away in the Pacific. None of these options were appropriate (if it had been my key that would have been a different story). It returned to Muncie and its rightful owner after residing on my kitchen table for a week. The best part of its tour of the Pacific coast is that it gave me several ideas on how to contend with the ring of keys I recently found from the house on Stewart Island that my family no longer owns. Throw that into the growing pile of what to work on this fall.


San Marcos, California


Los Angeles, California


San Luis Obispo, California


Monterey, California

*Failure to find home, failure to meet Ed Ruscha, and failure to find a keyhole any size that would hold Braydee's into place just for the photograph.



This image is not part of the sequence though I should have brought the flash... a low light/shallow depth of field photograph of how I left it on Braydee's front porch two days ago. Ironically, the key didn't even come close to fitting in her lock so I failed at taking the photograph of it not resting in my hand.

Keys Part 2

Daniel Bejar's The Visual Topography of a Generation Gap (#2 Brooklyn, NY), 2006

From the website: "A copy was made from my original apartment key, then a copy was made from that copy. This process was repeated until the original keys information was
destroyed, resulting in the topography of a generation."



One copy of Braydee's key that also didn't work due to information lost in the reproduction process.



This reminds me of Mary Lucier's Shigeko, 1970-72, back when xerography was a new art form.

Another thought for California: (Part 1 of Braydee's Response)

This artwork depicts all the keys that were given to my father when he purchased the YMCA (except one which I added for variation). I was recently given a key which I signed a contract promising to return after one week. It was one of 17 or 18 keys made to open the front door of Braydee's house but it was quickly apparent that not one of them worked. Her project was based on a fabrication - on trusting an audience that may open her door and do harm to her space (or merely occupy it or, or, or). Ultimately, she controlled us by giving us a key that didn't work. I felt cheated once I knew my key wouldn't fit in her door so I didn't return it. Why should I remain true to the contract I signed when it was based on a falsehood? I am usually one to live up to my word (signed particularly) but I couldn't this time. I thought about burying it in her yard but I missed two golden opportunities to do so. Today I decided that her key would become my personal symbol for the "home" I'm trying to find this summer. I'm taking it to California and I'm giving it away. I'm burying it there. I'm attaching it to a piece of driftwood and sending it out to sea. I'm using it to open someone else's door. I'm continuing the lie by making it mine. It's the metaphor for the home I will not find.