You can’t keep everything, so Stephen B. MacInnis is having a studio art sale. Sometimes nothing builds your spirits like a tidy studio, but the process can be soul-crushing. So much stuff. Where was I going with that? What was I thinking?

When I spoke to Stephen about his latest purge, I was keenly aware there was transference at work. I was terrified that something important might be lost. My work is all about collecting, sorting, and labeling to create and preserve histories. And OCD girl is happiest when the record is complete even though she knows that is impossible and that, that impossibility is kinda the point.

I need to remember that Stephen’s work will find new homes. And that, in the process of sorting and decision making, Stephen’s brain has logged a record of the trajectory of his practice which may well impact the new work he does in his now tidy studio.

Attrition: memory objects: sound; items which are not a part of  Will Robinson’s Cake Box of Technology, Sound and Performance, 2013; incidental pearl lodged in studio floorboards from  Island Poems collaboration, 2011, with Matt Bowness, Laura O’brien and Don Heisz.