I have always been a collector. My first collection was books, as I think many children start with their favorite bedtime stories as precious objects. It is one of the first time in our lives that we might feel a part of something that is not our own family. We befriend Winney the Pooh as if he were our friend and we start to get a glimpse of other ways of being. I started a lifelong pursuit of the perfect book, the perfect size, the perfect typeface, perfect color and of course that perfect old book smell. My first memories are holding books. I loved large-scale books that my little hands could barely hold. I gravitated towards Atlases. It really did feel like all the world’s information was held in the pages.  My mom and I used to go to this old bookstore call The Book House in Saint Louis. It was a three story Victorian home full of books: the study, the foyer, the living room, the dining room, the basement, the kitchen, and even the attic were an “organized” book heaven. Every inch of the house was covered with stacks of books. There were probably about six cats, too. I used to climb all the way up to the attic and read the Geography section. I was fascinated by the topographic map illustrations. The shades of green representing distant forests or the browns and yellows of faraway deserts. I have fond memories of rummaging old book sales for new additions to my collection. The collection eventually fed my fascination with the ocean. Like the tides, I would trade out old books for newer treasures. This would naturally lead to my second collection, centered around the ocean world. It was a highly curated and cultivated my deep fascination with marine life, coral reefs, sharks, and the biodiversity of our world’s ocean. This is where dreaming began for me.

I have never stopped collecting. There is something special about finding a copy of Henri Matisse’s first retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art or the National Geographic featuring photographs of the Grand Canyon by Emery and Ellsworth Kolb for the first time in 1914. This ephemera helps me tell my story in a better way. Maybe I am telling the story to myself in some oddly comforting way through objects.

My collecting habits have not stopped. My first project as a member of the education team at the de Young Museum in 2010 was digitizing a board member’s collection of art history slides. He was lecturing on the history of absinthe, an anise-flavored spirit derived from several plants, including the flowers and leaves of "grand wormwood,” together with green anise, sweet fennel, and other medicinal and culinary herbs. Absinthe has a wild history of causing one to be addicted to the “green fairy” and is portrayed in literary classics and film. This was the first time I was introduced into the world of these little treasures of translucent film. I sat there for hours holding the slide up to the light in the de Young tower through the perforated holes of the tower’s architectural skin. I would reach, trying to grab just enough light. There is nothing quite like the quality of a slide. The object itself, holding it in your fingers and lifting it upwards to the light (or the Disney viewfinder with the solid lever shaped like Mickey’s hand to switch images) to see what image is captured. 35 mm slides hold our memories of roadtrips, family vacations, reunions, and those distant memories of stodgy art history classes. We have moved well past the age of film into the age of the digital. I am not sure why I am always holding one hand, reaching back to the past. My fascination with Kodak film, developing, and the chemicals awash to create the image has never waned since I first went into a dark room in high school and learned to develop. I think it is the combination of science observation, natural resources, and human creativity that mix to create the photographic image that compel me. Is convenience and speed worth sacrificing wonder and awe? And you guess it, my newest collection has begun - 35mm slides. Specially, 35mm slides of Land art. Someone in Portland, Oregon has quite a collection of Walter de Maria, Michael Heizer, Robert Smithson, and Nancy Holt sculpture slides. And of course they are willing to sell them to me via the e-commerce landscape of Ebay. I purchased a new viewfinder and I can’t tell you how much joy it is to look at the slides lit up bringing to life the art that is in such remote places. The slides somehow brings the far away, capture the nearly inaccessible, a bit closer. And as I sit here in the constant state of bustle near Times Square, the slides give me a bit of solace and solitude. I can place the slide into the viewfinder, it wiggles into place and sits perfectly. I press the knob turning on the light powered by two double A batteries. The light shines. The image comes into focus. And magically, I am transported right back to the horizon line of the West.

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