Collectible
 
 

Project Description Project Status Fiscal Sponsor Screenings

Project Description

In our consumer-oriented, mobile, and rootless society, we are supposed to believe we are what we own.  With few ties to the past, collecting becomes one way of building a history.  It helps us define who we are and helps us to fit into our world.  Collecting then is about individuality and belonging.  What else might collecting be about?  What are the impulses that drive collectors?  Is it about comfort and security?  Is it about power and status?  Is it about capture and possession?  Is it about creating a sense of identity?  Is it about systems and classification?  How has the Internet extended the realm of what collecting can be?  When does the mania of collecting undo the ordering of an archive?  Where do obsession and collecting meet?  These questions and thoughts drive this body of work.

As a child, I collected post cards, stamps, and pins.  Long ago these were thrown away, but my interest in collecting remains.  I see collecting as one of the imaginative ways that people attempt to make sense out of a world that isn’t always very sensible.  As a video artist, I’m interested in documenting diverse styles and modes of collecting.   

The project, Collectible, is a series of short documentaries, a group of vignettes linked together, that investigate collecting, obsession, and archiving.  Each vignette will focus on one collector and together the series of shorts will become a collection on collecting.  We’ve chosen to highlight unusual, small collections that often go unnoticed.  As a whole, this work looks at the diverse ways that people gather, classify, and categorize their collections.  Specifically, the series explores idiosyncratic systems of ordering and questions what these systems say about our contemporary situation.