This is kind of a sketch for a much larger project I’ve been thinking about for probably two years now. I’ve dubbed it the “1000X Project”.
When I was maybe five years old, my parents brought home a huge basket full of apples and put them in our kitchen. I can’t remember if we’d visited an orchard or what. Apparently I snuck into the kitchen and proceeded to take a single bite from EVERY APPLE. Then I put all the apples back into the basket, turned so the bite marks were hidden. I don’t remember doing this.
I think my parents were amused when they discovered what I had done. My mom says she thinks I was “just searching for the perfect apple”. I have always liked to tell this story, not only because it’s kind of funny, but also because it seems like everyone I tell it to has a similar kind of story about something they did or said when they were a kid. As children we said or did things either out of curiosity or some very natural drive to create or to explore. And we started to learn, from our parents or others, that some of these actions were not quite “normal” or “appropriate”. Part of growing up in any society is learning about and then respecting certain social norms and boundaries. Adults who fail to respect those boundaries are probably going to be considered either rude or crazy.
For example, children like to stare. In line at the grocery store, I love to watch little kids staring at people. They haven’t learned yet that it’s “rude”- they’re just curious, and they find new people and new faces fascinating, especially if they’re different than the faces they’re accustomed to seeing. But soon enough they have it drilled into them by the adults in their lives that staring isn’t appropriate. And so they begin to learn to hide their curiosity, because it makes other people uncomfortable.
My friend Grace remembers being fascinated by watching her mother put on makeup. One day Grace took a tube of her mom’s lipstick and proceeded to cover her entire face with it. My friend Lisa grew up without any pets. She lived in a very arid part of Texas, and she started capturing tumbleweeds and trying them to a fence with string. She thought of the weeds as her pets. One day her dad untied them all. She was crushed. My boyfriend, proud that he could write his name, took a knife and carved the letters into his dresser. He showed his mother, thinking she would be proud, and found out otherwise.
These are the kind of things that are interesting to me. These specific moments of childhood creation and exploration- the things we remember but that we wouldn’t dare repeat. Maybe we were told gently, maybe we were laughed at, maybe we were scolded, maybe we were beaten. Maybe that moment was a turning point in our childhood, or maybe it was just one of many subtle lessons that added up to a larger picture of what we were taught about being a functioning member of society. Either way, we took note, and we started to change.
So for the project-I started by re-enacting my apple incident. I’m not really happy with the way it looks and I’d definitely re-shoot it for the project. I shot it in a small space in my old apartment with a couple of shop lights which nearly melted my face off. I bought a huge sack of apples from the grocery store and filled a basket. I wanted the whole thing to have a really intentional kind of ritualistic quality to it, so I tried to pace my motions and make everything fluid. I took small bites of apple but by the end I felt kind of sick. At one point I bit into a slightly rotten one and I almost gagged but I kept going! Uck.
I’d like to do a series of these, with adults re-enacting their specific incidents, all in a formal and delicate manner. Kind of conjuring up our spirits from childhood. I’d like to accumulate a whole catalog of these re-enactments, and then there would be lots of interesting ways to display them. I think about entering a huge, neutral white space with lots of these images projected one right after the other, larger than life, silent, ghost-like. I’d like to keep all the forms close to each other in terms of scale and then arrange them next to each other however they interact best visually…
Shazam! Please let me know if you have an “incident” you’d like to contribute to the project.
