PAPER-PUSHER

PAPER-PUSHER, combines the tale of a lonely, blue-collar worker’s elaborate fantasy life with an exhibit of reconfigured office ephemera. The work reflects poetically on early 20th century work life and the technological changes since that have rendered many of that era’s objects, practices, and roles obsolete.
This project asks a number of questions, among them:
What’s behind the impulse to accumulate? What drives our compulsion to collect and categorize? We save objects, make notes, and take photographs in order to remember and preserve. So then, is it through neglect and abandonment that we choose to forget?
As a culture we tend to celebrate “collectors,” question “keepers,” and pathologize “hoarders.” I’m curious about the lines drawn between connoisseur and packrat, visionary and madman.
And I wonder: where on the continuum does each of us sit? What makes the dance of holding on and letting go so charged?
Via PAPER-PUSHER, I continue my on-going inquiry into the many ways in which we use material culture to form identities, understand history, and connect with one another.