Becoming One with Second Seating

Just looked at all the photos Laurie Perez took of the students working on Clorox bottles the day she came to the Houston Community College classroom. They are wonderful. What startled me though were the several photos that she took of me with the students.
I am so used to being the one taking the photos, especially in preparation for this exhibition that seeing my image in the context of Second Seating was unexpected. I was taken by surprise and had to look twice. Yes, it was really me.

Laurie will be taking more photos of me with the objects and colors and textures that make 'Second Seating.' I am really interested in what her images will look like. Will I become one with my 'objects trové'?






I tend to fall in love with the spaces I create. I could have settled in and lived in that space in Marfa. When it rained the ballroom walls 'cried' because the roof leaked. I loved that the walls cried. Wouldn't it have been easy to add a dinner table and a hot plate very near the garments suspended from the ceiling? I might have shoved the bed into a corner as a gesture to coziness or intimacy, but that is all.


Wonder how the 'Second Seating' space will feel? Will I want to live there too? Under the chandeliers - which, by the way, are taking shape. I was at the chandelier man's shop this afternoon and am getting estimate on fabricating four different fixtures that will then be embellished with those now famous filigreed Clorox bottles, Dynamo soccer balls, Valero pipe fittings and oh, the chandelier with ribbons, faded flowers, chipped coffee cups and bits of memorabilia?
But I digress. Back to the photographs that Laurie took a week ago.


Perhaps it is not surprising I find it unnerving or quite wonderful to see 'me' in 'Second Seating' photos. I am immersed in this endeavor, yet the 'I' has remained essentially without form. 'Second Seating' is my daily default. However, before these few photos, the 'I' was only to be found in a stream of consciousness and eruptions of ideas, daily perseverance and often erratic heartbeats.