Rooming House Aceo

This card uses one of the photographs I took in Cape May, NJ in 2006. It looked like an old rooming house to me - where there would be a central living room, separate bedrooms and community bathrooms. It reminded me of a place I stayed for a while when I was 19. Someone I knew moved to a (much seedier) rooming house. We would sit in his room at night in the summer - sweating because there was no air conditioning - listening to the people next door having an agruement over who washed the whites with the reds and turned the underwear pink, a sad dog barking constantly, the toilet next door flushing every few minutes, couples laughing when they walked down the hall and sometimes trying our door by accident - slurring "sorry".

He hated it. I loved it. I hated being alone. Especially hated being alone at night and the sounds of other lives around me at night was comforting. It made me feel like I was part of something and not so isolated. The sound of the toilet flushing set his teeth on edge - for me it just meant a person was nearby. It meant that other lives were happening just outside my door - maybe storybook happy ones.

The place in the card brought back all those thoughts to me. About the hot summer I was 19 and shared the lives of a bunch of strangers through some green peeling walls. The card is more something that tweaks my memory and how something can feel when your young and how that spark comes back in a flash through an image.

The base of the card is cream mat board. Over the matboard there is a creamy paper with flecked inclusions. The artwork was printed on a natural fairly heavy weight paper embedded petals. On top of the image is another tissue weight paper with what looks like fly away wisps and gold metallic threads.

SOLD