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Read a short description of this project
Toward the end of 2008 I attended a lecture by Joseph Kosuth at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. He sat behind a small table with a desk lamp reading his way through page after page of a paper on his work. Toward the end of his talk, the last few pages caught my attention, as he held them close to the lamp in the darkened auditorium. It initially struck me as funny, because he appeared to be holding a handful of blank white sheets of paper; perhaps he wasn’t reading after all, I thought. However, on a purely aesthetic level, what I witnessed from my vantage point was quite beautiful—a handful of white pages appeared to be glowing and floating within the darkness, an idea brought to light, an illuminated manuscript of another kind. This observation served as the inspiration for Art as Paper as Potential: Giving/Receiving—a project that takes 365 sheets of ordinary, blank paper as its source material, one for each day of the year. As I thought more about how the written word functions as visual art, I wondered what would happen if the words were erased. What would remain? Piles of blank, meaningless sheets of paper, merely the foundations upon which the words, the works, used to be grounded? Perhaps not; after all, an erased de Kooning drawing is not simply a blank sheet of paper—it is certainly something less than it once was, but it is also something more. This project addresses the relationships between abstraction and representation, compression and expansion, fragmentation and creation; simultaneously, it is about the daily practice of making art, an act of giving and receiving.