Stolen Moments
I walk along Milwaukee Ave almost every day to practice yoga at the studio next door to the Ark. I pass by or drop in 2 or 3 times a week. There is always a commotion on their doorstep, shoppers, furniture arriving and departing, the flotsam and jetsam of life passing through, people waiting at the bus stop out front. It is like the old stone walls in the English countryside, where energy has accumulated and you feel a charge.
Thrift shops came into popularity during the Second World War, and there is a “greater generation” appeal that lingers for me, a sense of escape to a better time and place, in a past or future of your invention. This store is in my neighborhood-its familiarity and the relevance of my ownership of that made me want to do something.
The large cart from the store-front is a pandora’s box, a vehicle for the unknowable, it’s tattered appearance the stuff fashion designers might imitate for the upcoming season, newly trendy, like last year’s torn jeans. I call it ugly beautiful.
The portraits are of the working men and women from the Ark.
They paused to allow me to photograph them, but my encounters with them these many years has been eye contact and smiles. I have admired them from afar, until now.
These “Stolen Moments” of pauses and connections, like postcards from a foreign city, are slices of life that I carved and embodied into clay portraits.
Thrift shops came into popularity during the Second World War, and there is a “greater generation” appeal that lingers for me, a sense of escape to a better time and place, in a past or future of your invention. This store is in my neighborhood-its familiarity and the relevance of my ownership of that made me want to do something.
The large cart from the store-front is a pandora’s box, a vehicle for the unknowable, it’s tattered appearance the stuff fashion designers might imitate for the upcoming season, newly trendy, like last year’s torn jeans. I call it ugly beautiful.
The portraits are of the working men and women from the Ark.
They paused to allow me to photograph them, but my encounters with them these many years has been eye contact and smiles. I have admired them from afar, until now.
These “Stolen Moments” of pauses and connections, like postcards from a foreign city, are slices of life that I carved and embodied into clay portraits.
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