Do You Collect Trash in Your Purse?

Liz's post about collecting things off the street reminded me of an artist that I find fascinating. Candy Jernigan who lived and died too young in New York in the 90's collected all kinds of "evidence" of her life -- food, trash, bottle labels, dead bugs... She arranged all this stuff in journals and collages that weren't at all pretty, but they were beautiful in an abstract, painterly way.

Her journals impressed me so much that for several months after I read "Evidence," I went around picking up all sorts of trash and odd and interesting things I found on the streets. I still have boxes of stuff that I collected on one trip to Mexico.

Now days I see lots of artists and not-artists using tags and other ephemera in assemblages, but with Candy, I think she was an original. With a nod to the granddaddy of assemblage Joseph Cornell of course, but she put her own spin on it all and today you can see the effects with artists like Sarah Lugg (boy I didn't realize until just now how much she has turned her art into an industry-yeck!) and the stuff you see in magazines like Sommerset Studio.

The "Evidence" book is a finely-produced art book with pages that fold out to show the really big work, but of course in this sneak peek Amazon doesn't really show you the good stuff inside. Just gives you a little taste.

“In 1980, as I set out on my first trip to Europe, I decided to make a book that would contain any and all physical proof that I had been there: ticket stubs, postcards, restaurant receipts, airplane and bus and railroad ephemera. On successive trips, these collections grew to include food smears, hotel keys, found litter, local news, pop tops, rocks, weather notations, leaves, bags of dirt--anything that would add information about a moment or a place, so that the viewer could make a new picture from the remnants. Objects emerged for me as ‘icons’ for particular cities and these objects became the material for EVIDENCE.” Candy Jernigan