UNITED

2013, installation and performance

I had asked my artist friends to donate one of their towels for this project. I cut a long strip out of each towel, which I then knotted into oversized friendship bracelets.

The towels, along with my own favorite towel, were grommeted and bound together to form a huge and colorful banner. I also used pieces of my own towels to replace the strips in my friends’ towels I had extracted.

When I had raised the banner, I glued the letters “Contemporary Daily” on the wall with a paint brush and fresh water. As the water evaporated, the letters no longer adhered to the wall, peeling off or falling to the floor. Day by day, I returned to re-mount the phrase, for the duration of the exhibition.

I decided to divide the exhibition space by raising a wall.

While the banner, placed in front of the wall, was the first thing visitors saw when they entered, the shady backside of the wall was the perfect place for a golden tea-cart that served as a hanging folder storage. Here, I presented all the letters of rejection I had received over the years, for people to flip through, while listening to “All Gold Everything” by Trinidad James, a song that was playing on repeat on the headphones that came out of the wall – a huge MP3 player, if you will. I liked the idea that people would happily bounce to this song while going through the rejection letters.