F221: Furniture Purge

Having moved from Phoenix four years ago, from a house into a mobile home . . . my furniture purge actually was all but complete. I got all of my belongings in 2 loads of my little Nissan truck.

I whittled down a few more pieces since then. Even so, I recently became the repository for some of my son’s things. He is rearranging his place and didn’t know what to do with a small dining room table and four chairs. He wasn't sure he wanted to get rid of the table and chairs. I told him to bring them to my driveway for the time being.

Well now there is the community yard sale coming up at the end of the month, so maybe all can be sold.

I have to hand it to a neighbor of mine, he is hauling out so much stuff from his place. I complimented him, but cautioned him to be vigilant. My own experience shows that a big purge can create a vacuum that a person inevitably fills up again. I believe it is human nature and one has to really watch out. Sure enough, he has been visiting all of the local thrift shops looking for more. *sigh*

I found this wonderful image at Moments of Grace titled, Doris Salcedo installation for the Istanbul Biennal, 2003. Curious I looked up some background and found that Doris Salcedo is a Columbian born sculptor who makes political statements through her work. (My favorite kind of art, though she states that all art is political.) She is well known for her installation, a statement about racism, at the London Tate Modern, titled Shibboleth. The following is from a Tate press release.

In 2002 over the course of two days Salcedo lowered 280 chairs down the façade of the Palace of Justice in Bogotá to pay homage to those killed here in a failed guerrilla coup seventeen years earlier. Blurring the lines between performance and sculpture this extraordinary spectacle publicly confronted memories of this traumatic event for the first time. The following year, at the Istanbul Biennial 2003, Salcedo filled a derelict building plot with 1,550 wooden chairs. These were piled house-high and made flush with the facades of the buildings either side, evoking the masses of faceless migrants who underpin our globalised economy.