November's Post-it note art from Instagram
November's Post-it note art from Instagram
Over on our Instagram page, we're posting a weekly installation from Clare Johnson's Post-it Note Project, a long running daily project. Here's her wrap-up and statement from September's posts.
November's Theme: Same Day, Different Year
Looking through a decade of post-its, sometimes I notice weird patterns. For November, I started with the dates they would be published at the beginning and end of the month, and chose drawings from those same dates in two different years. This exposed a coincidence that made me smile and wince at the same time—both post-its from Nov. 3rd, five years apart, said “ouch”. In 2010 it was my injuries from a car accident, ones it turns out I never totally healed from. In 2015 I was watching a play in New York that felt like a stranger barraging me with every kind of crisis my family had survived the year before—being surrounded by a world of big broken hearts walking around everywhere. It feels like the “ouch” coincidence is even hurtling into the present: on Nov. 3rd this year my mom was telling us her cancer is back. And that play is now showing in Seattle; my parents are seeing it this week. The November 24th post-its exposed only a mistake—my Missy Elliott/Miranda Hart crush has the wrong date written in it. It’s nice to find a more lighthearted moment, because a lot of the drawings from late November get pretty heavy with the underlying heartbreak of Thanksgiving. I like the excuse to make stuffing, but the holiday makes me think of its history, displacement, a terrible disappearance. And personally, all the leaking hurt I could feel coming out of the grown-ups at the extended family gathering each year, my exposed-wound grandparents who would never, never talk about it that way. Then, looking at smiling family photos and knowing how things turned out for them. I don’t really want to talk about it either.
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