Life After Love

I’d first like to give one hundred and one thank you’s to Kat Culture for curating THAW, the group art exhibition I was lucky to be apart of January 30th, along with many other wonderful Jacksonville artists.

Life After Love collages my current understanding of how life sprouts from death. It is a mixed media patchwork of a page from my last diary, dried flowers, nature prints from photography books, and recycled paper trash. Knowing a page of my diary is up in a gallery makes my stomach turn a little bit but it was necessary to truthfully answer the question THAW was asking. What “subtle transformations- shifts that go unnoticed and emerge as new forms, voices, and ideas after long stillness” have transpired in my life this past year? When Kat sent out this prompt, I agonized over it for a month, struggling to articulate and materialize the moments of enlightenment I had been gifted over and over again. There were several fruitless attempts to create something for this show, and my self-confidence was failing. The night THAW submissions were due, it struck me that there was no better physical time stamp of these internal shifts I was experiencing than the diary I had finished a few days prior. Once it was settled to use a diary entry as the focal point in a collage, my faith returned, and Life After Love began to emerge. Maybe thirty minutes after that title popped in my head, Believe by Cher began playing out my open window. I thought I was imagining it at first. I held my ear against the screen with near tears in my eyes and knew I was on the right path. I never found out where the music was coming from or why it was the only song that played on my street that night.

With only a few hours left, I got to work ripping out, tearing up, burning, and painting on multiple diary entries, before I finally came across December 13th. It's a morning page that begins as a lamentation about a regretful decision I made the night before. I start to try to understand why I did it, then decide it would be more productive to describe my to-do list for the day. The page continues with a contemplation on THAW and how important the challenge is for me as I begin the new year. I end the entry with a prayer asking for the hands to see my vision through and a promise to give God the credit. The entry ends with my need to show people that something worthwhile will come from my period of isolation. I scribble “myself” over “people” when I remembered whose pride in me really matters.

I empathized with my December 13th self as I ripped the page up and torched the edges. I decorated the burns with pieces of golden chocolate wrappers I got from the airport in Paris. The pages were placed just so to reveal birds in flight, blooming flowers, and a traveling herd of deer; life carrying on. I had been drying a few of my mother's orchids in a book and used a couple to give my collage a touch more privacy and to honor the flowers beyond their life. The woman leaning over a book among the flowers was a little illustration from my late grandma's issue of Playboy from the 70's. The striped background was protective paper around art I received from a friend a couple years back. The day before I dropped off Life After Love at the gallery, I stopped by a thrift store for a last-ditch effort to find a better frame, and was blessed with the one that holds my collage now. It was only after the collage was complete and housed in the frame that I realized, beyond the collage as a whole, each of the materials themselves being second hand or recycled in some way are experiencing their own Life After Love.

Kylee