(R.I.P. 11/20/2005)
The wall was my “wonderwall.” The project began in early February 2002, and for many nights all I worked for hours in the basement. I began by rearranging some furniture in order to expose the wall.
I had to remove some pictures (like this sweet Star Trek light up fiasco), but of all the walls, this one was my best bet. One of the longest and most tedious parts of this project was laying the “foundation” of construction paper. Layering individual sheets took forever and provided a semi-cohesive element. The massive amounts of masking tape help the wall throughout its life, despit a few nightmares where the wall caught fire or fell down.
The next step was “painting” in more scenery for a nice pastoral view. The thing framed in black is rather cheery, no? The horizon of the happy wall was a collage of pictures I took from the train while I was in Taiwan. If you’ll take note in that last picture, the Emerald City is burning. An allusion to both The Wizard of Oz and Fahrenheit 451, two plays I was in my junior year. Inside jokes are personified on the wall. At first there were areas of sorts and… visual metaphors.
The clouds were things that I thought were special at first, but the entire wall is that. For awhile I didn’t update the wall and it was in a semi-full state of being for an extended period. The wall eventually ran together into a wonderful giant collage.
Once I thought about taking a bunch of pictures and turning the wall into a coffee table book in reproduction, but now the wall actually is a book. In fall 2005, my mother found new work and sold the house I grew up in. I came home for Thanksgiving and cut the wall into squares and stuck it into a scrapbook. So now instead of having a giant wall to run into and hug, I have a book to page through. Ashes to scrapbooks, dust to dustbins.
The wall was a tourist spot of sorts, because people came from all over to have their picture taken in front of it. It was myrthmecca of doom.
