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 16^th. 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.