The adopter, Eben Wood, writes:

The story of how I came to adopt Joy Garnett's beautiful painting "foraminifera4" seems very much in the spirit of FAAN. It is a story of unexpected connections, of openings and diversions, of welcome entanglement.

I first saw the painting at the AiG opening at which FAAN was inaugerated, and it was love at first sight. As a writer, I've always been interested in lurking, in blurring, in appropriation. It's really been in the past year that I've felt like that interest has begun to bear real fruit in my own work, and it was with a kind of shock of recognition that I clicked onto Joy's painting. What is that thing? I asked myself, but I didn't really care to identify it, to categorize it. I loved the surface, the blurring and the staticky, screen-like appearance of the painting. I love feedback in music, that distortion that makes us hear noise, that makes us hear the irreconcilable or incomprehensible.

So I signed on right away, composing an email to Joy as I sat in the gallery at AiG, the hustle and flow of the opening all around me. I like that word opening, because in this case it kept going. Joy emailed me back the same weekend, responding to things I'd said in my opening email about my own interest in blurred or transforming surfaces, about being a professor (assistant) at a two-year school in the CUNY system (Kingsborough), about teaching literature and creative writing and how little experience my students have of objects, things, that are not machined, that are not immediately instrumental and thus critical of the contexts in which they appear. I wanted, I explained to Joy, to hang her painting in my office at school, to be able to look at and experience it myself, but also to share it with the students that everyday come into that space and who all react to the artwork that is already there (my sister is a painter and collagist).

Joy and I exchanged a series of emails over that next week, introducing ourselves to each other in bits and pieces, by valences that touched on many different intersections, public and private. In telling me of an upcoming talk she had at a conference at NYU on "fair use," Joy also opened a previous connection. Last year, my first teaching at CUNY, I participated in a faculty seminar at the Grad Center, on "the New Media." During that time, I watched an on-line video of a talk given at Columbia U. by an artist who had experienced "fair use" restrictions on her own work after having appropriated an image she'd found on line. This was an image, or a partial image, complete in itself, of a Sandinista revolutionary preparing to toss a molotov cocktail made with a Pepsi bottle. That painting, which I believe is called "Molotov," appeared on the postcards or brochures announcing a one-woman show by Joy at a Chelsea gallery a few years back. To make a very long (and fascinating) story short, she was shortly contacted by a representative of the Magnum photographer who had taken the "original" image, asking that she "cease and desist" the use of the image. This incident became a textbook example of the rhizomatic world of image movement and exchange, blogosphere and world-wide web, raising more questions about art, appropriation, and identity than could possibly be answered. So, in short, I "knew" Joy before I re-discovered her and her work through FAAN, and realized through that experience how much we had/have in common as workers with images, ideas, and mechanisms of circulation.

There's much more I could say here, about attending Joy's talk at NYU and meeting her for the first time in person, of traveling from Brooklyn up the East Side to the Met in order to have lunch with her and where, in the crowded entrance-hall, I unwrapped and saw "foraminifera4" for the first time (I like the stuttering of those 4s there). Of sitting with her in Central Park and talking about her process and thinking and talking about my own, of photography and Nicaragua and Donald Judd and all sorts of things, realizing how much revolved around that painting as an action and not a static object. But, too, what a beautiful object it is, the resinous sheen of its surface and the mystery of its depths, the semi-transparent figure that is also at the edge of abstraction, never wholly there at any one time.

I've gone on too long probably, but it seems to me that everything I've described fulfills what FAAN was imagined to be, what it was brought into existence to be. A dialogue, of course, mediated by an object, a dialogue that in turn mediates that object, allowing me to experience and reexperience it as a process, directly and immediately, in the world and extended through time.

All the best, and thank you,

Eben Wood
ewood@kbcc.cuny.edu