INVENTORY
Inventory is not just evidence of twenty years of our compulsive habit of collecting; the show also illustrates the immense impact that "things" have on our lives. This past winter, our insurance company recommended that we document all of our valuable possessions, a request which soon found us knee-deep in Mexican hand-painted wooden trays, antique tin toys, and RoMco souvenir ceramics. The simple act of taking snapshots of our things made us reflect on our habit of chronically amassing bizarre objects. Why do we feel compelled to collect? While taking the pictures, we realized that each object is charged with meaning, whether it marks a specific event like a birthday or holiday, or is a souvenir attached to a different locality or country. Some objects symbolize meaningful periods of time, others remind us of family and friends who gave them to us. They have the same effect as photographs, literally distilling time/memory/event/location into a physical object, which creates a house filled with small, physical repositories of meaning. We are addicted to documenting our existence through things.

Could our obsession with collecting have begun in childhood? In school, adults validated the idea that collecting stamps provides an educational experience, a way to learn about different countries of the world and the people and places they contain. But as adults, collections reflect our values in more personal terms. They record our Personal History, and tell a story. In our case, it is a story of two men meeting, moving from coast to coast and back again, and building a relationship over the course of 20 years.

The overall narrative of our collections reveals the people who have come in and out of our lives, where we've lived, and what was going on at that time. In this body of work, we are attempting to "recollect" our narrative through the documentation and display of the objects. According to Susan Stewart's In Death and Life, in that Order, in the Works of Charles Wilson Peale, the collection "Öcompels the consciousness of the observer to enter into the consciousness of the collector-the opaqueness and fixity of the collection on display is transformed into the utopian republic of the fantasy where individual desire finds its fellow dreamer and recognizes itself." When it comes to this compulsion and joy of collecting, we are definitely not alone. There is something in the human spirit that drives us to know more about "what's out there" whether it's exploring inner space, outer space, or cyberspace. History has shown us that there is also an inner need to bring something back to remind us of our journey. In a sense, this need to explore and collect may be a subconscious effort to learn more about ourselves.

Garth Amundson's resume
Pierre Gour's resume

E-mail: info@shiftstudio.org

Website: www.shiftstudio.org