Just Visit
Driving back to Tennessee from Philadelphia, I received a delayed phone message from Clark, an old friend who was also traveling. He’d been looking for a place to sleep in Tennessee the night before, only I had just received his call. I blamed the mountains. I called back to see how he’d made out and to catch up, it’d been about a year since we’d last spoke. He asked where I was just as I passed a sign for Roanoke. I was 20 miles north of Roanoke and told him so. He was 20 miles south. We met at a Mexican restaurant off of I-81, and gladly shared the chips and salsa that were given to us but deemed whiskey the only safe bet on the menu. We shared a hotel room and our hopes and thoughts for the future. A just visit overall.
The objects and processes featured in Just Visit have come together with the same degree of alchemy present in that chance Roanoke roadside reunion. I am a maker, collector, and rest stop of objects. In past search and rescue missions I have sought and found many objects and materials, and somehow instantaneously know and place them in their new imagined lives.
These guys were different. Unsure of their exact purpose for my purposes I kept on collecting, amassing, hoping, and trusting that it would sort itself out by reveling some common thread, a shining hope, a special purpose. Animation and photography have proved to be the new, loving, adoptive home where these objects have finally come together for an easy nuzzle, a matching color, a completed tale.
Keeping true to catch and release practices, it’s time to let go. Some of these objects have been with me forever, some just a couple of weeks, but all of them have boasted some degree of promise or beauty to me. I ask that you blindly take them on, not knowing, but trusting that they will do something for you too.
They were just visiting.