Confidentially Speaking

21.5 x 29.5 cm
Found photograph, found book clipping, ink and found paper
Note - The (white) holes under her arms are cut out.


"No repetition will ever exhaust the novelty of what comes. Even if one were able to imagine the contents of experience wholly repeated - always the same thing, the same person, the same landscape, the same place and the same text returning - the fact that the present is new would be enough to change everything. Temporalization itself makes it impossible not to be ingenuous in relation to time." — Jacques Derrida and Maurizio Ferraris, A Taste for the Secret, p. 70

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I didn't really think ahead when I started this project. One year. It is and isn't a long time. I thought I should do some reflection on the repetitive nature of this project since today marks the 38th *38*. That means 15 to go....(last one will be on June 12th).

My first conscious experience with repetition was when I was a kid and did Judo/Aikido for quite a few years. I was the only girl in the class - until my sister joined. I loved it more than most anything else and I think I didn't miss a day unless my family was out of town. Repetition consisted of learning the throws and falls. It was there that I learned about how to train your body to respond even if you were not conscious of what you were responding to. The idea that your body could respond without your mind thinking about it was really interesting. It proved to work, as years later I had a bike accident and flew over a woman's car to land in a perfect Judo fall. It was amazing. This could be seen as maybe the physical manifestation of memory through repetition.

But I think what has been consistently interesting for me is working with old photographs. I repeatedly look at the photos I have - so much so that I start feeling that I know these people. I had the very, very strange experience of buying a few snap shots of a woman at the (Mauer Park) flea market from one of my regular purveyors (of fine snap shots). A few weeks later I went back to the same seller and saw more images of the same woman. I remember recognizing her but not being able to understand how or why. I bought the images and only realized later that I already had other images of the same woman. Would this then be the manifestation of memory through the repetition of looking? What I do know is that this project has become it's own entity and subsequently carved a place for it's self in my weekly routine.