Saturday, December 28th, 2024, was the last day that I saw my grandad.
I am very lucky to have spent my entire childhood with him down the street from me or a phone call away once I moved far and further from my hometown. Although, he never stayed on the phone longer than five minutes, he would consistently give me the weather report from across the country and always ask, “How is Ore-eh-ghan?”
These reports were always delivered in his distinctive Syracuse accent that he somehow managed to keep even after decades of living in North Carolina.
I will forever miss hearing his stuttering voice and sitting around the kitchen table together.
During our last conversation, Grandad had a notable smirk on his face. He chuckled with a childlike expression as he told me how much I reminded him of his mother. I think he was trying to say that she was also a collector of sorts.
December 2024, in the kitchen. Grandad always sat on the left and Grandma on the right.
Her name was Lee (whom I am named after), but I always knew her as Oma, only realizing later in life that Oma is actually German for grandmother and wasn’t her real name.
Oma’s collection of sorts is sprawling. I only have access to a small sliver of her archive. What I have in my possession is years of correspondence, love letters, and detailed diaries, with odd catchall notebooks here and there. Yet, even with all the records she kept, there are so many holes. Names I don’t know. Languages I can’t read. Questions that remain unanswered.
Collecting always felt like a trait passed down through my family like a genetic predisposition with no two collections looking the same.
Grandad’s collection was beer glasses. He was once featured in an article titled, “Gessler’s Glass House,” depicting his 4000+ beer glass collection from around the world. Each glass was curated and categorized by style and country, stored in what I used to think was a locked closet until I was old enough to be let in on the secret.
Grandad had a story for each glass and would gladly tell you if you asked.
Framed photograph of Grandad standing in his Glass Room, the same picture headlining the article, Gessler’s Glass House.
The link to the article is now a 404 error code and the digital file can no longer be found. But I bet if I were to rummage in my grandad’s room, I would find a physical paper copy squirreled away somewhere.
File Not Found was also the title of my recent two-person exhibition with Quinha Faria, at Carnation Contemporary, an artist-run cooperative gallery in Portland Oregon up throughout the month of March.
Installation view of File Not Found, Carnation Contemporary March 1-30 2025. image by Mario Gallucci
On a rare sunny day last winter, sitting across the table in Quinha’s sunlit studio, brainstorming for our upcoming show, she asked me, “what does care mean to you?”
This question was asked before my grandad was in the hospital and before we became aware of how sick he would quickly become.
Yet, in the moment the question was asked, I still thought about the word care in connection to my grandparents and the barriers my family was facing as we looked for accessible systems of support when their needs were changing. That day, sitting in Quinha’s studio, I shared how aggravating it was that caregiving roles fall predominately to women, my mom being no exception.
As it happened, both my grandmothers lost their husbands within a few weeks of each other, before and after the exhibition opened. In my phone conversations and visits with both of my grandmothers, I was reminded how poignant objects’ sentimental value can be when experiencing loss. In some ways my new body of work was my own way of anticipating grief.
Grief takes many unexpected forms. It can be a knife stolen 69 years ago on a honeymoon or a dinky old watering can. While one of my grandmothers is predominately vision impaired, she can still identify the knife by the shape and feel of the handle and uses it daily. My other grandmother immediately began cleaning and was surprised to find that when she went to get rid of a little ol’ watering can it brought her to tears. For her, the watering can became an unexpected symbol of love— embodying both an everyday ritual and a reminder of the special act of taking care of something and helping it to grow over time.
“It’s so silly, but I miss him so much that I have even slept with that watering can. It reminds me of him the most.”
I don’t find this silly at all. Etymology links the word ‘care” to the word ‘grief’
At the end of last year, just before the holidays and in the midst of planning for the exhibition, I had a passing conversation with Leslie Hickey, co director of the former Rubus Discolor Project and author of The Most Strange Telephone and Other Memories. She asked me if I knew about the New York Public Library’s Picture Collection.
Admittedly, I did not know about this public archive of physical images clipped from magazines and books arranged in folders for people to check out.
Leslie said she would be happy to look up something for me during her upcoming visit. Off the top of my head, the thing that came to my mind first was: holes. What would a folder filled with holes look like?
And at the same time that I received Leslie’s update about the absence of any folders on the subject ‘holes,’ sans the folder specific to ‘manholes,’ I happened to be reading Take Me With You, Laura Glazer’s book of interviews.
I had randomly selected Laura’s book to take with me on my holiday travels simply because its title asked me to. Curiously, the fifth interview, How it works to be Curious, is with Jessica Cline, the supervising librarian of the New York Public Library’s Picture Collection.
I laughed when I learned that a public archive is missing a folder of holes. There is a hole for the folder of holes. Knowing this, I felt I needed to create my own version of this folder.
As I continued reading, the last chapter, Listen to the Subject, Laura interviews artist, Nina Katchadourian. In this section I noticed the small detail in one of the photos showing an exhibition label that reads:
“The meticulous notation of things has a beauty all its own.”
For many years I questioned whether I should be reading Oma’s diaries or love letters. They shared a private history of beginnings to the endings I already knew.
Scanning over 50 envelopes—their folds and varied sizes and the accompanying handwriting or postal stamps—the accumulated marks and stains made me realize that they mark a map to my own history. The handwriting in particular, feels like learning idiosyncratic gestures and words that link specificity to the unknown.
I also kept thinking about the way Quinha defined her drawing practice during our studio visit:
“Drawing is thinking through hands.”
While cutting and cropping found phrases, “it’s not all gold that glitters,” and “my dear,” or “love lee,” I was also revisiting my own drawings and collages from my ongoing sketchbook archive. Curious about finding different points of connection, I screen printed found family handwriting next to lines made by my own hand.
There is care in notation and record keeping. In one blue-typed document, Oma had noted a memory of a river at the edge of a city that was spelled one way but sounded like another. I tried to emulate this river I had never seen before with glue and cut paper.
As I cut paper and glued it in place, removing and repeating until I found it just right, I imagined what a body of water through a city whose street names have long since changed might feel like. This river was also a line drawing, edging the past and the present, linking two very different places at the same time.
Much of this new work is about time— notions of simultaneity and serendipity— or is it synchronicity? In many ways, my deep dive into the archive was an interrogation on my desire to hold onto things despite the fact that somethings aren’t meant to be kept. Whether you are ready for not, time inevitably loses details.
And each time I walked through the exhibition, I encountered the space between objects, the interwoven loops, the gaps, or the holes as different vantage points for how to care for a question.
What does the word care mean to you?
On the closing day of the exhibition, Quinha and I gave an artist talk facilitated by Pamela Hadley, a time-based light artist and fellow member of Carnation Contemporary.
Which you can view here.
Thank you to everyone who came out to the show, asked questions, gave flowers, helped paint walls, or lended equipment and tools. Each exhibition is a huge undertaking and cannot be done without this community support.