Our culture generates mountains of forsaken objects: boxes of junk, piles of litter, abandoned clothing, broken artifacts, neglected collections, forgotten possessions.

When I pick up items from the ground, I feel like a social anthropologist studying the things we throw away and finding meaning in them. They are matter. Something that occupies space. Matter degrades and changes. It’s in the transformation that it gains a different intangible worth.

I found an especially appealing piece on the ground at a swap meet in Yucca Valley, CA. It was a small figurine of a headless banjo player. Perhaps it was once a decorative item, then broke and was discarded. I took a photo of it. The next day I wished I had picked it up. I went back to find it but it was gone. There was an attention to detail there at the swap meet I had not expected. I was sure it would be there. I saw it as a piece of art. Transformed garbage.

Artists re-contextualize objects and ideas in ways which enable us to look at ourselves and suggest new implications about life in this world. I started to understand through this breakdown in conventional meaning that the world I live in is a construct. Where’s my double face sledge hammer? I’ve got to keep battering that construct down. It will take my entire life because once one is down, another one will be waiting. When you climb a mountain, you may think you’ve reached the top. But you haven’t, you’ve reached another peak on the way to the top. In reality your body will arrive at the peak eventually. But in your mind, it’s an unending, dangerous journey through life. I never realized how hard it would be. I also never realized how tough we would all become.