Toyology

Armed with a camera, I go urban exploring through brownfields, derelict factories, abandoned houses and overgrown railroad yards. These were once important places but now they are wide open scars on the earth.  At this moment they sit empty except for graffiti artists and occasional squatters. In some of these places, people feel it is safe and appropriate to dump trash. Sometimes, alongside the tires and roofing tiles, the broken toilets and worn-out bedding are children’s toys. Finding toys in historic desecrated sites feels very different than seeing them in ordinary household refuse. The passage of time is acutely visible.

When I come upon discarded toys, I resurrect them. I make display boxes out of castoff wooden drawers that have their own long history of use and abuse. For each assemblage, I subsurface-mount a photograph of the discovery site to the back wall of the box. I paint the sidewalls with location markings and with graphics related to the toy’s background. On a side panel, I paint, in miniature, the graffiti I saw in the vicinity of the site. The toy, the location and the graffiti are all separate stories that come together to form a neighborhood in a box, my version of landscape painting.