Paranormal Postcards
Paranormal Postcards, 2001 and ongoing. Hundreds of postcards stitched with red thread, grouped and connected using dotted line wall network made of red vinyl, dimensions variable.
With time on my hands during a layover at the Oslo airport in 1997, I bought a postcard and stitched several lines of red thread through it. Intrigued to discover how a few lines could transform an image, I continued this practice of stitching postcards. In a few years they reached critical mass, and I organized them into groups, and then organized the groups into a huge wall chart called Paranormal Postcards.
The threads create—or maybe reveal—a magnetism between elements in the image. Because of the quantity of postcards, a “world view” of extreme and almost paranoid interconnectedness emerges. The organized nature of the chart suggests that this is a factual display of information in some way, but in fact, the organizing principle is highly subjective and shifting: it follows both a thematic and formal logic that seems to explain the latent relationships or power structures embedded in the world. As critic Jeffrey Kastner has written, Paranormal Postcards show “lines of force and sympathy between their improbable inhabitants, proposing a world connected in almost unlimited ways.”
There are few “operating principles” to this project that I don’t stray from. One is that I have to buy the postcards in places that I’ve gone myself—I don’t use cards that people have sent to me, or cards that others have bought while traveling. Because of that, Paranormal Postcards has come to double as a travel journal. The other rule is that each time the project is exhibited, I incorporate postcards from the city or town where it is on view so that people can recognize a local point of entry.
