I bought a 16×16 frame for $9.99 at the Value Village thrift store in Brooklyn Park last December. I had a great idea for a collage that didn't pan out. I had some leftover canvas from that abstract painting I'd sliced up. I had a shiny painting of Buddha that had great colors in it. I had some chickens that I'd sliced out of a magazine. I tried to make that thing work in several different ways, and the more I focused on what I wanted, the more ridiculous it looked. Honestly, I should have learned that lesson decades ago. The harder you try to force X to work, the more you screw yourself over. Maybe that won't be apparent at first, but one day, three kids and two houses later, you'll see that you wanted X so badly that you backed yourself into a corner. Plans should be subject to change. It's unhealthy to get fixated on X plan. That's why folks end up having a midlife crisis and leaving everything behind. They were so fixated on executing the plan that they didn't realize that half the time they were unhappy with its outcome.
A few days in, I did myself a favor and gave up on what I was trying to do. Instead, I let the color scheme dictate the narrative. I had a bus bench tainted with the light of a patrol car. It had been sitting next to a crime scene in 2021. For some reason, I decided to include a dilapidated basketball backboard that I couldn't get out of my mind. It sits in an alleyway along W. Lafayette Avenue. I came across it when I was trying to get around a crime scene one night. Police had taped off the main intersection and part of the block for a shooting. You can tell that someone made it with love and killed it with love, and a person might be able to say the same thing for a lot of events in West Baltimore. Love is the building block of creation, but it moonlights as Gozer the Destructor, too.
I chose the bench because I wanted to allude to the dark things that happen in West Baltimore without creating trauma for anyone. Something I wasn't initially aware of due to a combination of ignorance and leading a sheltered life is that trauma isn't triggered by experiencing the same event. It is the snake that slithers into your mind to remind you that the world is, at times, a horrible place. It can prevent you from functioning the way you used to function prior to Y event. So, I wanted to allude to the darkness without possibly triggering a bad memory for somebody. I knew the basketball backboard had an element of darkness, too. It was born from a dream. It supported a dream; but also, it died from the intensity of that dream. To me, that is a lot of the West Baltimore experience. Dreams are born there. Some of them survive their environment and burgeon into beautiful end results. Some of them are small. I can't tell you how many times I waited on that bus bench in the rain, in the cold, and the only dream in my mind was the warm bus showing up and whisking me away. I imagine thousands of people have felt that way at that intersection, at that bus stop. Small dreams matter, too. Then, there are the dreams that die under the weight of life's cruelties. Far too many of them go out that way. For that reason, I have named this collage "The Garden of Dreams."
Most of this collage is built on pictures taken by the Hubble telescope. I bought a fat book about the telescope's reach for about $5 at a thrift store. It has been one of the best purchases I've ever made. When I looked at this collage and thought, "This needs a night sky," well, I had plenty of night sky. It was the color of those pictures that drove the direction of the collage. Eventually, I felt like there was too much sky and there needed to be some other theme to tie it all together. So, I cut up the face of a commercial art cow that I'd bought for a few bucks at a thrift store, too. Look, if you'd told me even just three years ago that I'd be buying art and books from thrift stores to purposely cut them up, I would have been mortified. One should respect art and books, even if we're talking about bad art or questionable books. That said, who says they can't be repurposed?
Toward the end of the project, I added a row of vacant houses in the distance. In West Baltimore, there's really no way around them. They're a staple of the environment. They're like the sky: too vast and too sprawling. To create the row of vacant houses, I used one of the pictures of vacant houses that I took for a collage I'd made last year. That collage didn't work out as planned either. In my head, the houses lined up. In my pictures they didn't. So, I had to duplicate one block of houses and put those houses on both sides of the collage to get any form of symmetry.
After I was finished making the collage, I took it back to the place of its inception. I parked my truck in the alleyway and pulled out an easel that had been lying in the bed of the truck. As I walked toward the basketball backboard, I saw on the ground a shred of crime scene tape from one horrific event or another. It could have been recent. It could have been several years old. Hell, it could have been from the night I was out there. One of many nights. One of many memories. There was no way to tell. The high whine of construction tools echoed down the alleyway as I took pictures of the collage in front of the basketball backboard. It was the sound of someone taking a step toward a better future, be it some form of repair or home improvement. Life was in motion. It had never stopped. It would never stop.