A Collaboration in Friendship

A few years back, Laurie Corrall and Asheville BookWorks hosted a show of postal collages by Charles Farrell and myself made back in the late 90s. 

Here's what she wrote about it: "At core of this unique show are 11 pairs of postcard collages exchanged by two artists over a year and a half period. The 22 pieces have been selected from over 80 original collages that, in total, literally embody a stage in a friendship. As a body of work, they display collaboration and creative play in all its awkward grace, demonstrating a gradual deepening of craft and sharpening of skill. By the end of the collaboration, both artists were using 100% of both sides of the card. As one of the collaborators exclaimed, “It’s amazing that the post office even got them to our boxes!

 

And here's what I wrote on the genesis of his collaboration with Charles Farrell: “Back in the late 80s, when we first met in Portsmouth, New Hampshire—a small, coastal, artsy tourist town—a group of us took up all manner of creative play.  We met at cafes, put on loft parties, took road trips, explored the streets of the town. And it wasn’t long before we were ‘stealing experience,’ a term Charles and I made up to describe this trespassing play. Our goal was to wake each other up, make art, and laugh a lot in the process. We were also interested in inhabiting private realms in public places and finding ways to cross boundaries normally restricted in everyday life. So I guess these collages became another way for us to engage in subversive play.”

 

Charles wrote of his creative process: "Our daily world is often a moving collage of people, images, and events. The fragments of the day and the remnants of my night time dreams inspire my creative vision. In the collage work I have found a true medium to express my greater perception of the world I view. One of the aspects I have enjoyed in my collaboration with Sebastian appears in the aftermath of the creative process. A completed postcard is promptly mailed and forgotten. The US postal service then becomes an unwitting collaborator in the process, as the work moves through the chaos of various sorting machines to be scanned, cancelled and, hopefully, delivered intact."