Description
Lost Summer is a small boxed assemblage, seven inches tall and five inches wide. The front frame and top are covered with a color photo of autumnal foliage, and the sides are covered with color illustrations of an imagined primeval swamp with foraging animals. Both the sides and the top have small windows allowing for a view of the interior. Inside the front frame is a partition set back about an inch and containing a three-inch square window with a view into the main compartment of the assemblage. This partition is collaged with a rural landscape painting of two women workers in a grain field. On the floor between the frame and partition is a mirror. The central object of this assemblage is a gold male running figure from a trophy with green fur covering its base, which is mounted to the floor of the box. The box floor is collaged with a color photo of a moss-covered forest floor. The running figure has blue strings attached to all four limbs, neck, and midsection that are connected, with colored map pins, to a word from an English language primer. These words are: holiday, stagnant, statistics, greatness, patiently, and handkerchief. The words are on two panels that are mounted to the back of the box. Covering the back of the box is an etching illustration from a collection of Arabian Nights stories, of a long-haired, young woman contemplating the contents of a small lidded box. Both inner sides are collaged with comic book panels from a story about Louis Pasteur and his discovery of the principles of vaccination.
Thoughts
This artwork broke with two of my principled guidelines in making assemblages. One rule is not to have a solid idea of what the piece is about; the other I will reveal at the end of this post.
Intentions and Intuition
I knew at its inception what this piece was going to be about. When I construct my boxes, I rely on my intuition to guide me, and I rarely know what a piece is about while I’m making it. I do eventually have some insight into the overarching story of an assemblage, but ordinarily it occurs to me long after it is completed. Typically, I’ll get caught up in what the images and objects are saying to me while I’m placing them side by side, and the things they tell me tend to be more about particulars than about the overarching theme or story. I alluded to this in my post about titling my work, where I mentioned that, while a title typically comes to me in the final stages, it can also come to me at any time during the construction. I’ve heard novelists speak of how they write their stories, and there seem to be two general approaches. They either work from some sort of structured outline, or they just let the story come out on the page, trusting their storytelling instinct to guide them. My method has almost always been akin to the latter, but with Lost Summer, I had an outline and overarching idea, not at the outset, but earlier than any other of my few planned-ahead pieces. And I didn’t completely break from my intuitive method. I got the main theme of a lost summer from looking at the first few images I gathered together: the painting of the women in the wheat field and the scenic photo of New England fall foliage.
Getting Lost
If you haven’t already put two and two together from the title of the piece and its date of completion, this work was conceived during the height of the COVID pandemic as a response to that atmosphere. I was one of the lucky folks who could easily avoid contact with others, since my long-time employment had me working from home long before the term social distancing became common. But even with my isolated setup, I still witnessed the experiences of friends and folks in my community, and our anxieties were palpable. The summer of 2020 was surreal. I can see that now, in hindsight. Our equilibrium was off kilter, as we were cast adrift from our daily routines. The word lost in the title of my piece takes on two meanings. Not only was the summer lost to us, but we were also the ones lost, as in losing our orientation during that summer.
At that time, I reflected back on all my past summers and realized how—for those of us raised in societies where children are schooled in the fall, winter, and spring—we are enculturated from childhood into the feeling of being untethered during the summer. This feeling of being lost during this season is not at all unusual, but rather integral to our being. And during the summer of 2020, the pandemic intensified a deep feeling that was already there.
A Time to Live
Another subject that I went into this piece to explore is time. Because of how our culture separates summer from the other seasons, as I just mentioned, these days hold within them a heightened way of experiencing lived time. In addition to children being out of school, many adults take extended vacations during these months, and without the organized time structure of the workplace, our lived time during summer is what many people live for. The duration of summer time—whether it goes by fast or slow—is determined by our activities or lack thereof. There are no clocks in a true experience of summertime. The running figure is a nod to this idea of lived time. Many runners will use a stopwatch to time their runs, measuring activity to the metric of the clock. But for those who’ve experienced the euphoria commonly associated with distance running, there can be a mental state where time is suspended. There’s a sense of fully living in your body, and I think this taps into a truer experience of time than what the clock measures.
My Lost Time
My teens were a series of lost and empty summers, in that I was left to my own accord and had zero structure. But previous to these teen years, I had unique childhood summers because, for the first ten years of my life, my dad was the director of a summer camp, and he brought the whole family there every year. With the regular routines of a camp, I had structure during these summers. But when I was ten years old, my dad lost that job, and I had my first experience of an untethered summer. It was a bit of a culture shock for me. And I’m guessing I might have experienced the ennui more than other kids who’d had a lifetime to adapt to these empty summers.
When I look at this assemblage, I’m reminded of those melancholy days. But the running figure stands in for a saving grace during those years. I found solace and a vague structure when I took up running during my first year of high school and started competing in long-distance races during those lost summers. As a matter of fact, the central figure of this assemblage is from a trophy awarded to me as the MVP of the school’s cross-country team. So yes, here is the second cardinal rule for building my assemblages that I broke: not to use personal objects. Recall the previous post where I explained how my work was not autobiographical. [What My Art Is Not] So, I used a personal object, one perhaps tainted with nostalgia, in one of my assemblages. I think the pandemic somehow called me to do that. It certainly was a time for doing things differently, and perhaps, during that summer, I was lost.
