rabbit, rabbit

This past New Year’s Day, my mother sent a text message to our family group. “Rabbit, Rabbit!” she said. We followed her lead, all wishing each other a joyous New Year and adding to Mom’s quirky superstition. I began thinking about that term, Rabbit, Rabbit, and how often I’d heard my mother use it. She told me it helped bring good luck. If the words are the first thing a person utters on the first of a new month, then that person will enjoy prosperity and goodwill. I accepted her reasoning. I still find myself starting most months with the phrase. I figure it can’t hurt to try.

For the last few years, I’ve thought a lot about paradigms and conditioned understandings. I’ve been particularly interested in those parts of my life connected to southern folklore and social practices. I’ve noticed dualities more and more frequently -  where things are both true and untrue at the same time. So much of how I’ve lived my life has been based on accepting how those before me lived theirs. We are not just the sum of our own experiences. We are the sum of the experiences of everyone we’ve ever encountered. What they choose to do and believe has an impact on how we do the same. Over time, historical accuracies become blurred, and ideas shift, often to the point that what is understood in the present looks nothing like it did in the past.

I made this work to help me articulate the patterns I’ve witnessed, accepted, and carried throughout my life. These are photographs I’ve gathered while wandering. I do so often without the intent of making anything at all. I simply find solace in meandering and looking. Inevitably, an image emerges, and I record it. It isn’t until much later that I revisit my archives and find connections. This body of work is the physical reference to some of those connections.

I wanted to recall old processes of sign-making. I’ve used wheatpasting techniques that point to early ways of advertising. Scale is achieved by collaging smaller prints together to form a larger collective. Edges are misaligned - from a distance, they appear to connect perfectly, but upon closer examination, their imperfections emerge. Lines are askew, pieces overlap and overwhelm one another, and patterns break down. Yet, they hold their projection if you stand far enough away. 

I wonder sometimes if the point of it all - whatever IT means to you or me or the inevitable connections the two of us are bound to have in our own histories and families - isn’t as simple as that movement; that dance. We get too close, we lose the big picture, we stand too far away, we fail to see the cracks. So we move, and look, and consider and move again. Somewhere inside that ballet, if we’re lucky, we begin to break free.

~wj / April, 2024

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