Primary Colors: An Exhibition of a Young Boy

I walked into Finnegan’s Toy Store in downtown Portland earlier this month to try to gather some ideas for this exhibition. As I entered the store, my heart instantly started beating a little faster, a small grin crept across my face, and images of my childhood clouded my vision. Now, we all know this feeling, no matter the age, because the reality is, we were all little kiddos at one time, and nothing can ever replace that feeling.

Primary Colors, as the tile suggests, reflects the busyness and imagination of young children. I wanted to portray a sense of innocence and simplicity. Additionally, I wanted to question the sense of value, because to a three year old a collection of lollypops is just as significant as a collection of African diamonds, or Van Gogh paintings. At what point do these collections become valueless; at what point do we realize that our best friend has button eyes and is filled with beans and fluff? To explore the idea of subjective value, the exhibit is handled in a very professional manner, showing great importance to the collections, and images displayed.

Each panel reflects a different interest/ theme: Friend, Bus Driver, Fire Fighter, Horticulturist,
Conductor, Paleontologist, and Sweet Tooth. These titles further push the idea of the boundlessness of a child’s imagination as well as a way to organize the exhibit.

The objects were gathered from the house of Lesa Benton and Laith Al-Aridh on Caruthers Street in SE Portland and the photos were taken on site as well. All of the objects date from 2006 to present. The toys are wired onto the panels for easy removal and return. Additionally, having them wired on further dissolves the toys real meaning and purpose. It also instills the theme that the objects are being displayed in the utmost importance - as if the toys are still in their original packaging.

While viewing the exhibition, you will hear portions of my interview with Aden, the main subject of the display. While they are informal, and more of background noise, I enjoy the childlike, innocence it adds to the strictly visual display.


Exhibit Catalog

Panel One: Friend

Plastic horse collection
Dog caricature
Photo portraits of old friends
Chopsticks/ Bug Pincher

Panel Two: Bus Driver

Trimet Bus Pass Collection
Photo Portrait of the Bus Driver
School Bus Toy

Panel Three: Fire Fighter

Portraits of the Fire Fighter
Fire Truck Toy
Hot Wheels Car

Panel Four: Horticulturist

Jungle Cats
Tree Frog
Portraits of the Horticulturist
Shovel
Rubber Ducky

Panel Five: Conductor/ Paleontologists

Train Sticker Collection
Wooden Trains
Dinosaur View Master Disc
Green Dinosaur Collection

Panel Six: Sweet Tooth

Ice Cream Sequence Photos
Colorful Ice Cream Spoons
Dum Dum Collection

Update: luckily, Lesa and Laith (parents of Aden) loved my box so much that they are going to frame each panel and hang it up in Adens room (that is...after they replace his toys and figure out how to prevent aden from eating the dum dums)

The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away

This article was interesting in that it was an engaging narrative of a mysterious man and his entire life of documenting everything. The most powerful parts of the story were the excerpts from the mysterious man. Automatically I pictured a house in my home town that is basically become a junk yard - no one ever sees the man who lives in this huge, scary, cluttered house, but everyone whispers about him and tries to come up with some sort of conclusion as to why he collects all that "stuff " in his front yard.
Back to the text, the one thing that really sticks out to me, even today, is when the man talks about paper, "These streams, waterfalls of paper, we periodically sort and arrange into groups, and for every person these groups are different: a group of valuable papers, a group for memory's sake, a group of pleasant recollections, a group for every unforeseen occasion - every person has their own principle" (33). This passage made me analyse every single piece of paper that my hand touched, and I thought back to "The Street" and I broke down paper into its singular units : trees, pulp, and ink, and whatever is on that paper oddly makes it valuable or invaluable even though they are all of the same chemical makeup. This is just the beginning to understanding humans desire to collect and document.

Reflection on "Collecting - so normal, so paradoxical"

plainly said, this article was my favorite. I didn't expect to learn more about myself through taking Idea and Form this term, but through our study of collecting and curating, I found a little more self truth. Collecting for me has always been a habit in order to remember the past - which is a key aspect in the article. Additionally, I relate to the "artist collector" that the article mentions. All my collections are very organized and cataloged as opposed to chaotic/ obsessive collecting out of fear of the unpredictable (remember Y2k?). For example, lately I have been packing up my dorm room to return home for the summer, and I don't look at myself as a perfectionist or very neat (my room is usually in shambles) but all my Tiffany blue matching boxes were all neatly packed and labeled with a list of the box's content, and I have to admit I got quite a fear stares and whispers as I wheeled the neatly stacked boxes down to the car. I just have to document and organize. This article, as well as our visit to Cooley Gallery, further instilled my love of curating and solidified my desire to on day become a curator. From cave drawings, to paintings, to photographs, it seems the only way to fully documents history is through images and artifacts.