William Stone's vessel for the rings was built from a single fallen branch off of a tree on his property upstate NY. The box itself is made from the rest of the branch, and the knot, i.e, 'the tying of one,' makes for a perfectly apt and pun-ful lid for the box. The small branch nubs were sized to fit Bec and Ruben's rings perfectly.
I made this replica of Karen Lofgren's cake, since making another one to sit for the entirety of the show was a fly-infested idea, so I bought these two cement blocks from a salvage yard, and painted them with acrylic paint mixed with gobs of gel medium to get a frosting-like consistency. The rebar and puddle were the actual ones that were on the real cake for the wedding.
My sister, Bolyn Hubby's photograph (left) of a couple of older women holding hands, graced the exhibition. More of her photos graced the wedding itself. They really impacted the mood of the room positively - the anonymity of couples caught unawares, showing their affection to each other in some way, was a poignant backdrop for Get Hubbied.
I decided to show my piece for the wedding, the bouquet, in its broken open state, post bride bashing.
these little messages in bottles were inside the bouquet, and what spilled out onto the floor as the bride bashed the flowers open. The daffodil, Ruben's favorite flower, had pick up lines for guys inside. And the daisy, Bec's favorite flower had tips for gals on how to catch a man.
Though it was impossible to recreate the magic of Michele's set, next to the ghost of the set with as much glitter as I could muster, I placed a a small digital frame with a slide show of the actual photos from that night - sort of like seeing the gymnasium in the morning after the prom.
Here is an installation shot that caught a great shot of Joe drinking a glass of water before his 'sermon.'
a recreation of one of the guest tables, with a digital slide show showing Tyler Hubby's photos of the event.
I wanted to extract from our correspondence for this piece since Nicholas' words and thoughtfulness are so much a part of his art, even when they aren't literally IN the art. These pieces of jewelry were borrowed and returned. They had symbolic value for the couple, and Nicholas made reliquaries for them to rest, and when those things were returned their resting places became more than when they were there to begin with. The memory fills those spaces, just like the dent in a pillow and a scent of a person after they've left the bed.
this is from Nicholas before he even began working on the project:
"i already ordered a 1869 copy of "the science of new life" a book on marriage that i will probably attack and use as the container of one of our new martian photos about love and bonding and use a blue ribbon from them as the bookmark. i may dye the pages of whole book blue on the inside. its filled with wonderful advice for both the wedding and afterwards just working on the borrowed part, will see where that sends me."
and then, further on in the correspondence with Bec and Ruben:
"i can either carve a place in the book as a storage and display spot for the jewelry, or take a photo of them and use that in the artwork. i like the idea of using the weighted blue shot bag (from Ruben's photography job) as a stand for it, though it might take some alteration. you will be keeping the sculpture/book/photo object and i like the way certain books have carved out holes for precious objects and family heirlooms so was interested in defacing the books victorian ideas about marriage with your family treasures and inserting the future of love, the intertwined mars twinning couple in white bound into the book . my hopes were to dye the pages of the book blue without destroying it, so that may take some engineering. i would love to see the jewelry and the weight so i can make a sympathetic color of blue. i appreciate your concern about selesnick, he is part of this and not, he was crucial in making the photo, but has put the whole rest of the project in my hands and is fine with whatever we come up with. his name can be on the signature tag as it will be a kahn + selesnick collaboration, just one that is more from kahn because of my long standing friendship and sympathies toward Ms Hubby and her exceptional Art."
and then, to me:
...thanks for the reliquary pics, always love them as sources. wondering if your couple could trace the shapes or xerox them even better, so i have the exact size of the jewelry, i can then cut the holes for them without the jewels being here...
and his final statement for the piece:
"something borrowed something blue": a victorian manual for marriage, painted blue, carved into a case for the brides borrowed jewels and sitting upon the grooms blue sandbag from his filmmaking work, encasing a new photo from Kahn & Selesnick from Mars in the future, two people joined back to back by a tangle of connections."
"I wanted to make a sort of machine made out of parts from other 'soft' architectural machines that the couple bring to the marriage: cameras, Frank Lloyd Wright, Gaudi and Man Ray.... So, it is a diagrammatic marriage machine..."
Here's the drawing that sprang out of the conversation with Bec, Ruben, Barbara and I. I think it's companion research imagery is needed to flush out the feeling of the piece so I printed out the research, laminated the pages and attached them by a gold chain to the drawing for the exhibition. The images and ideas are like birds fluttering around in the cage that is in the drawing. It is as Barbara said, a marriage machine. A machine that ingested our conversation and created it's own architecture with the ideas strung up like laundry on a line. I digress, but it may be appropriate, like trying to describe a dream sometimes commands a certain degree of the abstract.
