Fourth Comings_ A Jessica Darling Novel - Megan McCafferty [118]
Hope’s paintings were hung on the opposite side of the space. I hadn’t expected so many people to attend the group show, but the space was crammed with hands clutching their plastic cups of cheap wine, faces nodding contemplatively, bodies swaying to the ambient music selected by the iPod DJ, mouths opening and closing and opining on the state of the contemporary art scene. It took me several minutes to wend my way through the throng, many of whom were predictably dressed in head-to-toe black. Others—like the Wiggity-Wack Retro-Wigger with his blond Gumby, patchwork Heathcliff Huxtable sweater, and thick dookie rope chains, or Little Miss Indian in her beaded moccasins, red, white, and blue feathered headdress, and pink Pocahontas nightshirt from the Disney Store—presumably saw themselves as 24/7 performance artists whose incontestably retarded fashions put the Care. Okay? and Fuckyomomma crowds to shame, and could inspire even Dexy to pledge evangelical devotion to the Gap.
I caught snippets of conversation, reminding me of a joke Hope once made about how her classmates at RISD often confused contemporary artists with con artists.
“…celebration of the sacred and profane…”
“…deconstruction of gender-specific archetypes…”
Hope was exhibiting a series of oil paintings titled “(Re)Collection.” A small placard explained the inspiration behind her work, in Hope’s own words.
In January 2006, I was on a road trip with my best friend during which we planned to visit our nation’s most expressively named cities. I forced her to pull over our rental car so I could check out a flea market held in a church parking lot on the outskirts of Virginville, Pennsylvania. There, for the price of five dollars, I bought a box of approximately 250 loose photos from the 1950s to 1970s. I was drawn to these unmarked snapshots documenting the major and minor milestones in an anonymous family’s life. I manipulate these images by computer and by hand, an amalgamation of old and new techniques. I combine the past with the present in medium and message, both restoring history and reinventing it.
For Hope, those photos told the real story of our road trip. But for me, they had been a totally forgettable part of the experience, a point not even worth footnoting in the infamous carjacking story, when, in fact, Hope had fanned those photos all over the table at the Bandit Diner, trying to get me to see their beauty, trying to get me to see what she saw in them. All I had seen was a pile of humdrum pictures of people we didn’t even know doing perfectly ordinary things that every family did: Blowing out birthday candles. Grinning in front of the Christmas tree. Posing stiffly next to a prom date. Showing off a shiny new convertible.
But now these reimagined images were striking. Moments once captured in stark black and white were painted over in vivid yellows, pinks, and purples. Hope used broad strokes that made each canvas appear slightly out of focus, giving each scene a muted, distant feel of a dream you lose upon waking. These paintings were at once familiar and brand-new. The close-up of a pigtailed girl howling with tears in front of the lit candles on her fourth-birthday cake brought me back to the meltdown I had on my bitter sixteenth birthday when my carrot cake came with vanilla frosting instead of the cream cheese kind. The awkward teenage couple in their polyester formal wear evoked the prickle of gooseflesh, the gasp of anticipation, when you unzipped my prom dress and let it fall to the floor….
I don’t know how long I stood there, oblivious to everything going on outside my own mind.
“You’re here.”
I turned around to see Hope standing right behind me. She smiled when she saw that I was wearing the hopeweaver original T-shirt with my broken-in jeans and the Chucks I’ve had since high school. She was lit up in a black-and-silver Lurex striped sleeveless cowl-neck sweater minidress. It was an outfit