So, finally, here’s what I was making at Elsewhere for the past three weeks.
I selected twelve items from Elsewhere’s collection — the thousands and thousands and items from its days as a thrift store called Carolina Sales from 1955 to 1997. These twelve items were a Bart Simpson doll, a gospel LP by a local bluegrass group from the 1960s, a mug from a 5-year reunion of the state math and science magnet school’s class of 1982, a pair of 1960s-era skis from a nearby resort, a couple of tennis rackets (one wooden, one graphite), a copy of Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio published in the 1940s or ’50s, a 1938 yearbook from a women’s college in Virginia, the first Talking Heads LP, some delegate ribbons from various state labor federation conferences in the 1940s and ’50s, a Smith-Corona electric typewriter, a wall map of Guilford County, where Greensboro is located, and an Ampro 16mm film projector.
Then, I found people around the state of North Carolina to talk about these items with me, because they’d either owned the specific item, or owned one a lot like it, or had some background professionally or personally that lent them some credibility on the subject. Those people were, in order of the items, a TV critic who’d once worked at Suncoast Video in the 1990s, the local AM radio DJ who’d written a testimonial of the group’s prowess for the reverse of the LP, an engineer who’d graduated from the math and science schools class of ‘82 (and had attended the reunion), the manager of a ski store who’d grown near the resort in question, a tennis instructor who’d been a state juniors champ in the 1970s, a cardiologist in New York City that may or may not have owned that exact copy of Pinocchio in the course of his childhood, the two current editors of the women’s college’s literary journal, a man that formed the first punk rock group in Greensboro in 1977, then moved to Manhattan to make custom shoes on the Upper East Side in the early 1980s, the president of the North Carolina AFL-CIO, a Greensboro public defender that moonlights as poet, a writer and mapmaker in Raleigh, and a collector and archivist of 16mm film. I talked to each of the people on the phone, transcribing as I spoke to them (my years spent as a professional secretary were not in vain). Let it never be said the people of North Carolina are not extremely generous with their time. The president of the state AFL-CIO took half an hour out of his day to talk to me on the phone about some art project? Amazing.
Next: I made a drawing of the object on a piece of Bristol, then assigned it a number. Then I typed up the conversation and drew a portrait of the interview subject on another piece. The first sheet I shellacked to a stained wooden panel about 10”x13”, then shellacked the other sheet to the reverse.
Then, I tagged each item with its number in the store. You can see the Bart Simpson doll and the projector tagged.
Finally, I built a wooden box for all the panels. The whole piece is now at Elsewhere, box, panels and all, for the foreseeable future. None of the information will be made available online, except for some of these shots. It’s all a completely on-site experience, between you, the objects, the drawings, and the voices of the interview subjects. I thought initially, well, maybe I’ll post this stuff online. But I like the fact that it lives only in the museum.
Specifically, it’s up front, by the windows. Most of the space is pretty intentionally curated and arranged, but they preserved the front part to look more or less like the shopkeeper kept the store — totally cluttered. The box lives in that clutter. The wood shop manager, a brilliant guy named Ian, helped me make the box, and it looks really nice. It’s well-made, and I hope it stands out from the riot of objects around it. If people want to interact with it, great. If not, no problem. That’s generally what Elsewhere is like.
I’m not sure there’s much of a future in the field of making wooden zines, which is what I took to calling the object. But it was great to build an actual one-of-a-kind art object again, for the first time since I gave up canvas painting. And it was great to talk to an amazing bunch of North Carolinians about their areas of expertise. Amazingly, of all twelve interviews, only one was a dud (I won’t say which, but you’ll know when you read them). The others were incredibly funny, informed, knowledgeable, passionate and eloquent.
When I was writing the pieces up, I had my friend Brad do a quick editorial once-over to smooth out any mistakes. After reading them, he said “most of them turn my preconceptions of that region on its head.” I agree. I don’t know exactly what I expected North Carolina to be like, but it’s home to some remarkable people. Living and working in the space was wonderful, but even better was talking to all of these people, spread all over the state, about their lives and their work.
My last weekend in town, I was out at a bar seeing some mediocre wizard rock bands play, and I found myself telling a cool North Carolina girl about my project.
(And a quick parenthetical aside about cool North Carolina girls: they are effortlessly cool in a way that is totally surprising and unlike in anywhere else I’ve ever been. I think it’s maybe twenty years of low-level background exposure to Merge Records or something like that, but all these girls have amazing thrifted warm weather outfits, excellent mid-Atlantic accents, and seem like they know their way around the Archers of Loaf’s back catalog, if you know what I mean. Boy howdy!)
I thought this cool North Carolina girl looked skeptical at first. She looked at me for a second, though, and then she said, “That’s great. I wonder what ripples all these conversations you’re having will leave.” I was glad she’d framed it in this way. I don’t think this project changed anyone’s life — I am sure it didn’t — but I do like the idea that talking about a person’s life and work in this context gives them an opportunity to reflect on it in a deliberate way, and further reflect on how it all might fit into the larger framework of North Carolina. All together, the twelve stories paint an appealing portrait of a place. The twelve objects weren’t anything special. It’s the stories behind those objects that make them worthwhile.
