Collection.

"One need not be a vessel to be haunted."
Emily Dickenson

Someone I admire told me that they had an idea. We were talking about living in the Midwest, and how shocking it is to see miles upon miles of farmland. The strange houses in the middle of nowhere, the signs made out of white picked fence posts that read threats, "Sin is a Cancer for All People". Signs in fields, miles away from anyone, along the side of the long stretches of road on the Oklahoma highways. His idea was to find the people who made these, and photograph them. Now, I am no photographer, and in general, most of the "photographers" that I know use iPhone cameras and Instagram filters, which I am not interested in, even though I feel like it would be so easy to get away with.

I love the idea of this project. It would be a documentation of an experience  but I think that the real art in a project like that is not in the image, but in the experience. Like a process painting. I think that an alternative to photographing (or even in addition to) these people and their stories would be to translate them visually into small paintings, maybe to be displayed alongside photos, if with any photos at all, maybe just the notes themselves. The people that work in the restaurants that look abandoned, the maid at the side of the road motel, a hundred miles from anywhere. The farmer who gets up at 4 a.m. to read his bible to his home schooled children. The organ player in the church, and the janitor at the Creationist Museum, etc. What a brilliant idea. I want to have this for myself as a souvenir of my life in the Midwest, before I move somewhere warm and become a different person.