i'm trying to keep better track of what i send away.  i have committed to a year of documenting what i make, 30, 40, 50 pieces of mail so far.  i'm not sure i feel okay about the keeping of any part of the mail.  maybe the point is to send it all away, that mail is about the sending off, the losing.  but i have a few more months of giving it a try.  we'll see.

January 2009 was Antarctic.
We three explorers lived under a rowboat, part of Medicine Lake's Art Shanty project.



Read, watch, see our Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition here.

                                            Things Written on Them: 

Ransom Notes:                    Confessions:                     Obligatory Holiday Mail   Mail Fraud

Mail That Never Arrived:    Letters You'll Never Send:        Junk Mail:                  Memories:

I have spent two weeks a nervous wreck, unable to write about it here because it was all such an unsure secret.

i have been looking for my mystery South Carolina penpal, a stranger who contacted me on the internet to be her penpal. 

my plan was to drive to her address three hours away with Elsewherians Mary, Sarah, and Ian.  The three would deliver a singing telegram and paper invitation for her to come to meet me in person for the first time ever in front of everyone at my Artist Conversation Friday. 

but we discovered, upon arrival, that she didn't live at the address i had for her.  a woman named Delecta Rollins, a mean man, and a baby lived there.  a neighbor said no on named Lily had ever lived there.

was she a lie?  did she move and not tell me? 

we spent the day searching for her, asking neighbors, visiting former places of employment, and wandering around apartment complexes in the town a neighbor said she'd moved to, all to no avail.  maybe this is called stalking.  it started out as a nice surprise.

by the end of the day, we had a lot of video footage of our emotional crash and the dissapointment of not finding her.  i edited into a documentary to show at my conversation, in lieu of her coming. 

but in an anticlimactic homage to the miracles of the internet, i contacted her on myspace, and she agreed to come to my conversation!

i decided not to tell her about the documentary and the stalking, in case she would then decide not to come.  the days before she arrived were a nervous tornado.   what if she didn't come?  what is she hated me for stalking her?  what if we had nothing to say to each other?

but it was perfect.  more perfect than it could ever have been, and she wasn't angry and she hugged me, lke her first letter promised, and she played songs on the guitar that she had written about penpals and us, and she brought her marvelous family.  the conversation was easy and nice, even in front of the crowd.

  

afterwards, everyone came inside and wrote letters to fill up the post office boxes i made.  there were stations scattered around the space, and so many letters were deposited.  it was amazing.  i spent last night reading them all.  so many people have so many secrets that they are waiting for any opportunity to anonymously dump into the world.

there was also a pen pal song-writing time, recorded here:  much of it is inaudible, but two songs by Lily come through pretty well-- one at the beginning and one at the very end.  turn your speakers up up up.

i realize i have never really
explained here what i'm making:

a set of post office boxes,
some built as replicas of
other elsewhere spaces
and installations

(the aviary, the red room, city)

i am also making a movie about
finding something.  more on that
later.

all of it requires a lot of skills i didn't think i had (and maybe still don't have),
like electrical wiring, joining awkward tiny pieces of wood together, and
video editing/ filming/ etc.

now i'm down to the crunch.  waiting on a mystery to pan out.  will report later.