Housework, 309 Edgecombe Avenue
Tracey Goodman and I have been friends for more than a dozen years. We met in the Bronx Museum’s Artists-in-the-Marketplace program, we’ve been in shows together, and once we shared a studio space. Our lives are woven together in many other more quotidian ways besides. Being in her apartment studying and making responses to the space (always on days when she was at work) felt like a strange yet inevitable extension of our friendship.
Her home seems to be a thing that has grown up around her organically. There is a decorative logic that is the result of years of following a specific art practice and aesthetic path. Her colors are subtly different from the ones I’d choose: I’m also a big fan of pink and blue, for example, but she favors cool shades while I favor warm. Everything: from the clothes she wears, to the art she makes, to the space she lives in, feels like an extension of her personality. It’s an expansive and generous mix that includes her grandma’s knickknacks, vintage 1980s dresses, books of feminist theory and poetry, her friends’ artwork, her overweight cat Tulip, and some pretty amazing mid century furniture (mostly found on the cheap and revamped).
I tracked and recorded. I traced the way light moved across her wall over the course of the day, using masking tape and thread as a marker. I brought out my Coloraid paper and created palettes that matched the things I especially loved. I made little paintings of the patterns of some dresses and textiles, like a handmade swatch book. Her bathroom had a strangely tiled floor: over the years new and different tiles were inlaid to replace broken ones. Into this floor I pressed clay, creating slabs that I then used to make vessels and plaques.
And the books. One thing I love about borrowing books from Tracey is that she is a prolific underliner and marginalia-maker. Before I started the installation, in response to her fascination with indigo (which has made its way into several of her projects), I had recommended the book Bluets by Maggie Nelson. I found a copy in her house, all marked up. I read it through again (it’s a book I read often, I’d recommend it to you, too, most likely). I compared the way that we read the book. How could you miss that phrase?! I’d think when I read a favorite part that she hadn’t underlined. Or I’d read her margin note and suddenly see something I hadn’t noticed before, see it from her point of view. I created a hand-typed, bound copy for her of just her underlined parts, floating around on the page in relation to where they were in the original text.
We planned a joint opening/housewarming party. A bunch of friends came over. We talked about how her the little apartment was, how happy we were to be in it like this, all together. Everyone got to wander around studying things up close, under the guise of checking out the installation.
Tracey said she lived with my readjustments for a long time, but eventually she had to move all the books back to the bookshelf, from where I’d clustered them on a credenza to frame/echo a painting that was hung above it. She needed her books for reference and for lending, and my system was too different from hers. Fair enough.
