I’ve made a project of picking single words from their original contexts then placing them in new surroundings. I’m fascinated by the power of context.
My first effort was to make a set of greeting cards, Wordwise Cards were sold all over the globe, even at Trader Joes.
I’ve experimented with other formats, there’s a children’s book here for example, but what I crave and can’t seem to find, my “Holy Grail” is to find a way to display a “One Word Poem”. Words are hungry beasts, they seek modifiers and verbs and subjects, our brain automatically puts them in phrases or full sentences. But stripped of context, a single word expands to become a poem all its own.
The closest I’ve come to dealing with context in a playful way is to have pairs of words combine in a random manner. Here is my “Poetry Machine” (best seen vertically on a phone)
SIGNS OF LIFE:
The history is that I started isolating single words in Tampa, Florida where I was stranded for a month and going nuts. In urban Florida every possible angle is preconceived and manufactured from either asphalt, plastic or steel. There were no walks through forests and streams, rather I was surrounded by signs for nail polish and gasoline. I couldn’t find spontaneous organic juxtapositions for my impulse to frame in my camera aspects of my experience. It was suggested that I pass my time in Tampa by searching out the varieties of painted public language and stripping the words of their original contexts. Since then, whenever I’m traveling or just walking around my own city, I look for words to add to my collection. It can become a dangerously obsessive habit, but now I’m happy to have this collection of over 2000 photographs of words to operate as a tool for my own expressions.
