Drying Our Boots By The Stove by Ann Toebbe
Burning Down the Second House by Ann Toebbe
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Tuesday Edition: Ann Toebbe
Tuesday greetings, my collector friends. We are buzzing with activity at JBP HQ, preparing for Friday's Hey, Hot Shot! opening at the gallery, and trying to get a jump on everything we've got planned for February and beyond. All that stuff crowding our springtime calendar seemed far off in the future until I looked at the calendar and was forced to calculate in days instead of months. Maybe it's the bleakness of February that makes it impossible for me to remember that it's the shortest month of the year? I get tripped up every time! The good news is that I'm catching myself earlier than usual this year, and aside from that, the weeks ahead are chock full of fantastic editions, which makes me downright chipper.
I've been looking forward to introducing you all to the work of Ann Toebbe for quite a while now, in large part because I'm so fond of her distinctive way of looking into her past. Drying Our Boots by the Stove and Burning Down the Second House are composed in a fashion that mimics her memory. In her statement she writes: I place everything as I remember it and render all the elements of the space up to the same level of detail, which allows me to include everything I want to remember about the room in one picture.
It all adds up for me too — her style, which she aptly describes herself as a kind of folk-cubism, seems to mimic how we might construct memory. Being older and wiser gives us a broader, more sophisticated way to communicate our pasts — our dexterity refined and our knowledge broadened, we can reference the world that existed before, and after, a long-ago moment's essence was fixed by our childhood self. At its core, memory is shaped and held by the skewed perspective of childhood — our smallness and our wonder and our forming selves mix together to create something altogether different than what we might revisit if we could.
As is well-evidenced by my previous newsletters, my own memories — real and imagined — play a huge role in how I connect with the work we publish and the artists who make it.* In their reconstructions of childhood and memory I see more of them and of myself. I don't have much in common with Ann's childhood experience, but the way that she represents those memories shows me that we share a way of seeing. That kind of connection opens all kinds of doors into the past and future.
*Tangentially: Sara Distin teases me about my Walter Benajamin ways. She gave me his incomplete (yet mighty hefty!) tome, The Arcades Project, for Xmas. Inquiring as to whether I'd cracked it open yet (I had not) she recently assured me that it's just perfect for my ADD-addled free-associative mind, in that I can open it anywhere and read a snippet and put it back down again. (She's right — I just tried it!)
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