It's early in the 2000's. It is the end of the semester and my classmates and I are standing in the basement of a former mattress factory that serves as the campus's art building. As we stand around chatting and sorting through stacks of finished work, one by one we pack up our portfolios and head down the hall into a darkened room.

It's slide day.

Slide day would come every year at the end of the school year. We'd put our newly minted art up on the black studio walls, in front of bright, soft boxed lights on tripods, and shoot slides of our work. We'd then take the finished slides, carefully crop the image to show just the artwork using thin foil tape, and then label each slide with the title of the work and the year it was produced.

These slides would then be used to present our work to potential gallery spaces and clients.

As you can imagine I haven't had a need for these slides in years.... decades. But I took something more important away from the experience. An offhanded comment my professor, Masumi Hayashi, made while I was shooting some of my work.

"There is something about seeing it [the art] up on the wall. It never looks finished until you've seen it up on a wall."

I think about that all the time while I'm going through my recent work. I've got two spaces in my studio, a shelf off to my left, and a hanging rack just in front of me where I can set works in progress. They are far enough away that I can get some distance from them, and still in my line of sight so they catch my attention as I'm going about my day.

I learn a lot about my work this way. It's always smaller than I think it is. Most of it is missing something. Having it up on the wall gives my subconscious a chance to work through the problems while the rest of me is working on other things.

Sometimes is takes hours. Sometimes days. Eventually I'll look up from an email I'm writing and realize a composition is too busy or that I'm on the verge of saying something but haven't gotten to the point yet.

That piece will come down off the wall and a new one goes up. I come up with solutions that I wouldn't come up with otherwise. These slow burn answers that I can't force my way to.

You Need to See It On the Wall