Monday, July 24, 2017

Misty and Jon Getting Married Add and Returns Project


I feel like I’m stuck in an add and pass hell. As soon as I finish work on some add and passes, scan them, and then post the images, I end up getting more. Instead of making things of my own I end up spending a lot of time just “adding to” and then moving things along This routine is fairly recent to me. For the first few years I was making mail-art I never really added anything. I’d pass without adding. I could never think of what to add to the composition. One day I just put down some stamps or an image and that was it, I was making them.

About two years ago I started making my own sheets. Most of the add and passes that I’ve started have a place attached to them, either a wall in New Orleans, a billboard in Lexington, or a taco joint in Lexington North Carolina. All of the former were based off pictures that I took and then monochromed. There’s some other sillier ones out there, my favorite being four blank squares and another of my face with the words “fix this face.” I use my visage a lot because I can make fun of myself but I don’t want to do that with other people. It comes off as vain when it’s more self-deprecating.

I’ve also taken to using a lot of colored paper, something I haven’t noticed others using a lot. I especially like printing off my add and passes on notebook paper I find lying around work. I’ll go digging around in the trash to find some especially unique.

After writing all of the above, going deep into the add and pass hell, I decided to start another project. Sometime, in the middle of spring, Misty and I decided that we were going to get married on June 16th. We put everything together in about three months, sort of. In actuality most of the work was completed the week before we got married. I was in charge of the invitations. I handmade 75 of them and I tossed in a bunch of blank Misty and Jon Getting Married Add and Returns into every envelope. I also sent them around the world to my mail-art friends. I put two in each invitation and two for every mail-artist that was interested. Some of them were done on white paper, some on random paper I found and repurposed, (the Osaka phonebook was my favorite) but the majority of them were done on paper given to me by my great aunt. It was a pile of stuff she used for scrapbooking.

The submissions rolled in rather quickly. I scanned every single one of them. Some were turned into three dimensional objects so I had to video them and post them online. Although I was getting annoyed with add and passes I had created another project where I was getting a ton of them. As of now, and I’m sure this number is going to go up, I have about 90 different pieces of Jon and Misty art that have been collected in a large binder in my archives. Actually it’s two different binders.
The video above is all of the single submissions we received.

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