it is gone, and then beautiful

martin venezky is a designer who immerses himself in a carefully considered and arranged world of visual noise. by collecting found materials, postcards, advertisements, and "ephemera," he generates a collaged stillshot of a moment in the form of an abstract visual field, often too complicated to pull particulars from, that keeps the eye roving without settling. venezky connects items and imagery by color, and by form, and by emotion, and by any number of things, consistent only in its inconsistency but never, ever random. it is this methodology that relates most directly to our recent work.

in our taxonomy book, we were asked to look at a vast collection of structurally related marks. the only thing that they all absolutely had in common was that they were the evidence of a nontraditional drawing material. it was then up to us, in our partner-groups, to look at the sea of data and let organizational systems swim upwards to us. the idea is not so much to split and organize as it was to look at our data as many ways as possible, and come up with divisions and associations that might not necessarily be apparent at first, but prove, in the long run, to be more meaningful.

i personally identified very strongly with the concept of detaining things with an extremely short lifespan, extending the life of an object once its usefulness has worn away, leaving only its beauty. he rescues the things he puts on his walls, keeps them from being thrown away and forgotten about, keeps them in a big visual time capsule, lets them become important in a way they were never necessarily intended to become important, until suddenly their time is up, whether only to make room for another artifact or because the entire wall must be eradicated for a move of studios. i find within myself a responsibility to the things around me to try to keep them, and let them live out in meaning and aesthetic, even once their original purpose has dried up, and in this way, i am incessantly collecting things that, unless i can display them in some fashion, i have this instinct that they resent me, that they're heartbroken and longing for respect. presumably venezky is not so much an anthropomorphizing crazy person, but he, too, compulsively displays things that would by many others be easily discarded, even though his collages are still only temporary pushpins in a wall.

yaiy emotional magpie behavior!