Semiotics of a Box

Turns out a cardboard mountain is a poet’s playground, should the steel-toed poet find their way to it. Amid this landscape of crushed and flattened and flayed corrugation, the lusty language of marketing collides with brute directives and a particular lexicon of instructions: Thou shalt consume the contents of this box and feel alive. Thou shalt not cut, nor crush a box. No knives. Narratives accumulate: Traces of households in transition, their intimate moving instructions writ in Sharpie. Bombastic block print messages in praise of bathroom tissue, power tools, lawn ornaments, and frozen crinkle cut fries. Constant reminders of the fragility of eggs. 

The concept for this work evolved over four months working as artist in residence at King County Recology, where narratives were pieced together with text and images excised from cardboard boxes collected at Recology’s Material Recovery Facility. The work that emerged during that time reflects a poetics of consumption, seduction, and instruction inherent to packaging. Not quite paintings or poems, these things are descended from poetry concrete, with words scraped, stripped, rebuilt, sealed in hard gloss. Lines are not linear, but meander like an automatic drawing. A series of small poems run the gamut of textual chance encounters and word happenings, some dowsing for meaning while others relish in pure pleasure of mouthfeel. A fainting couch, re-built entirely of cardboard on the frame of an antique chaise, is a nod to the febrile spirit of consumerism in Zola’s Au Bonheur des Dames, while offering a moment of respite for the weary cultural glutton, the consumer of art.