This slideshow requires JavaScript.

I’m not hundred percent sure I have never been here before, well physically yes this is my first time, but I have found myself many times in my life sorting endlessly through miss matched toys and stuff trying to make sense of it all.

I’m reminded of sitting on the floor with this professional organizer weeping terribly as she told me that my kids would never learn to love anything or play as I had envisioned with the mountains of stuff I had gathered for them.  She only had one doll and she took it everywhere with  her, that doll is with her today…but kids like mine don’t even know where to look first there is so much stimulation around them…how could they even focus on one thing long enough to even appreciate it.

That day I let this woman walk out of my house with thousands of dollars in toys to give to the poor. ( I kept imagining her having this massive yard sale and making a killing so not only was I paying her 75 dollars an hour to tell me I had spoiled my kids senseless, but now she was going to go home and sell all those kits of lego and magnet building and toy cars and planes and god knows what else … hell there was so much I have no idea what I had bought them.

Of course they didn’t miss a thing and life went on minus the beanie babies and plushies, and blocks and puzzles and, and, and.

Anyways I find myself here at Elsewhere up to my ears in toy cars, and trucks and action figures, McDonald Land kids meal gifts, you name it it’s here.  Other artists have attempted to create order … I think before I got my hands in there they were sorted by color.  I need them sorted by material and with like things.  Not that this will be my end project, but I guess it’s helping me understand what is here and I what I have to work with.

I don’t really see how this fits into my body of work, although it is kind of meditative, like when I take the boys to some play group and while the leaders where leading I was in the corner in the ball bit sorting the balls by color.

I have my Artist Talk today out on the front stage of the museum which opens to the street anyone walking by could see my naked body covered in chocolate pudding/and black food coloring ( The Oil Spill ) or me covered in diet books. Of course I had way too many slides but I just zipped right through them. I figure if someone has a question over the next three weeks it will come out.

The Elsewherian in charge of the woodworking and tool shop evidently got his masters in Paper Mache from the a University in Portland…I was hoping he would have some questions, but perhaps over the next few weeks I will find out what his favorite recipe for paste is and learn what he made out of Paper Mache.

Everyone seems really interesting and I’m looking forward to seeing their finished projects before they leave…as I have missed their artists talks presented shortly after their arrival.

There are some beautiful installations here, rooms filled with strange objects in even stranger situations.  Not all of it can be properly experience via a still photograph but I will try my best.   There is a lot to learn here, it’s a bit overwhelming at first…I came here with several ideas based on what I saw on the website and how I think I might like to engage with the community, but after today’s grand tour I see so many other possibilities

From the core cut through the whole building….like a giant esophagus creating a giant mouth and some kind of webbing or net made of the endless ribbon from Sylvia Gray’s Collection and to through toy food down through the mouth and see where it ended up.

A curated dinner that would conclude a two week series of interviews on what people eat and how they feel about their bodies.  An Stigma Awareness Last Supper so to speak…right in time for Weight Stigma Awareness Week.  Or my idea about provenance in which I would continue to play in the junk until I found three or four of my favorite things…then I would make found posters and place them all over Greensboro, inviting the community to come to Elsewhere and tell me about the object…was it their’s? did they know someone who had one?  Did it remind them of something?  In the end giving the items a kind of history…beyond the fact that they where cast offs unwanted and traded for money and left to gather dust.

Once again I don’t really know what I will be learning from this process or what art will come out of it.  They say not to do anything for a few days until you have had a chance to acclimate to your surrounding and give to know the collection intimately.  I feel more then ever that I need to do a piece that was inspired by being here…not by my research before hand.  What will that look like?  I don’t really know.  I just need to play.