The Second Story
Host / Curator: Anne Sconberg
Artist: Julia Goodman
Anne Sconberg lives with her husband, Mark, and their young daughter, Charlotte, in a single-family, two-story house across from a large, grassy park on a quiet block. The aesthetic and tactile quality of Julia Goodman’s handmade paper sculptures drew Anne to her work. Julia’s recent work has centered on paper reconstituted from junk mail. In this current body of artworks, the process of gathering the raw materials, unwanted mail, is just as important as the final product.
As a curator, Anne enjoyed the idea of turning this wasted substance into an object of meaning and beauty. However, she worried that her recent move might have disrupted the flow of junk mail into her mailbox. Therefore, Anne and Julia collected not only the Sconberg’s mail, but also, in a door-to-door junk mail campaign, that of their neighbors.
Julia characterizes junk mail as words and graphics that are “fast, impersonal, and not open to dialog or interpretation;” She has recently concluded that the opposite to this form of advertising might be found in poetry. Julia sees this as a balance between the push of product-oriented consumer culture and the pull of more abstract notions of creativity and play. This new development resonates deeply with Anne’s education in English literature and her appreciation for the sculptural possibilities of poetic verse. This sensibility presents itself in Anne’s garden, where snippets of poetry are etched into stones that form the garden walls and line the walkways. Both Julia and Anne delighted in the similarity of their individual discoveries of the potential for sculpture in the written word.