November 2019'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 November's posts.

November's Theme: I’ll Show You What I Show You

My friend Laura is an undeniably formidable poet, choosing November’s post-its like a poet too; she said she’d been thinking about framing. She bookmarked scores of pieces that subtly draw attention to their own framing — words that add something you could never glean from the picture — or only match the imagery if you’re me, suddenly framing the scene in a different light — moments set on stages, my implied gaze impacting the theatrical frame — images embracing their own drawn-in frame — information boxed off, or fighting against the frame of the page — I could go on — I suddenly want to wax poetic about a queer gaze and modes of looking in ways I’m terrifyingly unequipped for academically — I will not go on. Laura’s choosing plan cleverly articulated something that locks fingers with my entire post-it endeavor, and feebly trying to verbalize it here makes me again feel how formidable she is. Hours into writing about our friendship I’m now deleting in huge gulps, saved somewhere else, unsure how to tell what’s for everyone when we are not everyone. It’s safe to say I love her fierce delightful brain, her wit surprising and inevitable every time I see her like it clocked me in the chest exactly what I’d been waiting for all day. She pulled off a mystifying trick of ultimately choosing post-its that life proceeded to echo back at me all month. I’m flying as I type, traveling away from my sister in New York. It’s her “maybe most prized possession” in the first post-it, improbable treasure cast away on the street outside her short-lived job bartending in an alienatingly trendy hotel. The trunk, plastered with antique theater posters and 1960s Time Magazine covers, was one of many left behind by 2 older guys who explained their dance company in the 1950s-60s had used them for carrying costumes on tour. After tortured self-debate about the impracticalities, my actor sister strong-armed a cab driver into letting her bring the trunk in, hauling it home to new life as a beloved-yet-awkward coffee table, and now, years later, her partner’s “closet”. (Laura, strange genius that she is, was privy to exactly none of this information when she chose it.) This trip I’m hurtling home from also meant times with the toddler starring in the second post-it. I talk on the phone with his dad year-round, but once a year I find myself able to wander uptown into their home and daily life, know their kid. He knows my painting on their wall as Clare, knows it better than he knows me. He’s lived his whole life with this thing I made, when I only hung out with it for a few months. My superlative freedom is walking alone at night. Someone took it from me 18 years and 10 months ago but I was unspeakably lucky and grabbed it back later, going through the motions till I stopped startling, I never flinch when my streetlight shadow overtakes me from behind now, I know I’m lucky, feel it through my legs and fingers every walk home. The fourth post-it is a trainee ballerina, the best in the showcase, we were in the front row so I don’t know if anyone else could hear her. Whisked away mid-dance and I’ll never know where the rest of life takes her, I guess dancers heal from injuries all the time, she just kind of crumpled. I told Laura about it soon after, she knew what the drawing was without asking. In closing, I know just 2 people who say it tickles me — Laura, and my sister. Looking back in my journal didn’t help, that night I was thinking of so many people I love. I said to Laura, “This one’s gotta be you, right?” Is someone rushing out a doorway laughing? Is it me? I might figure it out, but it’ll be too late to tell you then. When I described it to my sister, she said “It was me I bet. I did all of it.”