On The Mattress Series

The mattress series followed some extended down time in my working life.  I was out of art school and finding myself at a loss for an audience and peers.  My job was next door to a “mattress warehouse” where apparently mattresses were sold.  Benign as that may be, I found a new obsession there.  The business would deliver new mattresses to people and return with their old mattresses and deposit them in arbitrary rows outside the building.  As my office was situated, I found myself staring at a row of patterned, colored, stained rectangles that changed daily.  I was afraid of the mattress as subject because (frankly) it’s too loaded, clichéd, and many other problematic associations.  Yet, I couldn’t let go of my obsession with the way these objects looked across the parking lot from me.  I began to photograph them as if documenting the different boxes that came and went.  I painted a few bad paintings from the photos, but was not happy to do just that.  The work really started to take shape when I attempted to recreate them out of store bought materials for installations.  I bought various materials and battings and upholstered wooden panels with them.  I would paint patterns and purposefully stain them attempting to recreate the types of images that I had seen.  This type of activity led me to a desire to be more authentic.  I began going under a veil of night next door to strip the mattresses of their fabrics.  I had a friend watch to ensure that I wouldn’t be caught.  There was a bizarre elation at the prospect of doing something illegal, yet it was arguably no big deal.  On one hand, I was vandalizing and stealing property from a business.  This is a big deal.  But, I was stealing old rotten stained trash that was only to be discarded.  That was where my questions began.

I wondered why these experiences and the materials they produced proved so valuable to me, yet not to the people I stole from.  I queried about the unknowing participants in my work.  These warehouse workers surely found it odd that they would arrive at work to find bare mattress bones.  I harkened the fact that normal people would turn over their shit-stained, blood-stained, piss-stained, too-old and broken down to admit it mattresses to this company for disposal, only to have their stains and commissions hanging on gallery walls unbeknownst to them.  The stains and evident history surrounding these mattress-objects wrote mini-narratives as I encountered them.  The age-old found object concept of value re-entered my mind.  I liked the fake mattresses next to real photographs next to manufactured pieces that used authentic mattress fabric.  It brought to mind questions regarding the validity of one piece as opposed to another. These questions began to have deeper resonance to me than the way the pieces looked in the beginning.  I used the fabrics to construct new pieces and displayed the whole lot together.  The process was a both a search and an exorcism.  I searched for a way to deal with this subject that seemed interesting to me whilst exorcising the obsession in doing so. 

What do I do when I “use up” one obsession?  How do I find another?  Can I work without one?