‘ALL THE NEWS THAT’S FIT TO PRINT’
75 years ago Homer Collyer was found dead in an armchair in the 5th Avenue Brownstone mansion he shared with his brother Langley. The NYPD emptied the house of 130 tons of refuse including 1 horse’s jawbone, 25 thousand books, 14 pianos, 5 dressmaker’s dummies, several guns and 15 year’s worth of daily newspapers. 19 days later they discovered Langley’s body less than 10 feet from where his brother had died, suffocated under the weight of his collapsed hoardings.
I gather and keep my own hair in jam jars. I collected thimbles as a child and was teased for it. I hold onto a defunct Adana printing press, whose instruction manual is useless. I own a dead mans collection of ambiguous printing plates. I have rooms worth of miniature furniture yet no dolls house for them.
In an ode to brotherly love and the Collyers’ obsessive compulsive hoarding, I created a 'ghost' edition of the New York Times distilling 15 years of minor news stories taken from the NY Times archive between 1933-1947. Re-printed and re-published for the benefit of the late blind Homer Collyer as a ode on the futility and sadness of saving everything.
Letterpress printed broadsheet, white ink hand printed on 50gsm newsprint, 597mm x 374mm, edition of 5 2012.
In addition to the broadsheet I created twin mausoleums housing interpretive personal collections reflecting some of the objects discovered in the Collyer home. Specimen boxes contain Sunograph prints, Letterpress prints, inkjet digital prints, and various objects. The coffins are not to be separated, and only exhibited as a pair, re-visited in 2014.