WIll you pante my nells tudey?

"Will you pante my nells tudey i wont them to be nise"

Just a couple of weeks ago I posted a "found still life" that I called "Snaily's Nightmare." It sparked a new project that I'm calling "Dream House." When you have an imaginative 6-year-old daughter (who wants to be a paleontologist/dancer and ride a pink motorcycle to work), you come across so many surreal tableaux that they start to become invisible to you. When you're busy, the toys your child painstakingly arranged as part of some complicated imagination game just look like clutter. And it's not that you never notice. I mean, when Eva puts earmuffs and a pink sleeping mask on Wrinkly, her stuffed bulldog, you have to laugh. But then you move on.

However, the Snaily photo sparked off a project, and just in time for a call for entries that I plan on submitting to tomorrow. I won't post any of the photos I am submitting until I find out the results (bad luck), but the photo above is part of the extended project. I found it last night at 2 a.m. and wrote myself a post-it to photograph it when I got up. The lighting is soooo bad in our house that I have to use a tripod for almost everything. But I can't move it to better light. That's against my set of rules. It has to be where I found it.

I took several other photos today. The funny thing is, when I got home from work and Eva said "Do you want to come play with me in my clean room?" (she had played all day), I thought, Oh man! What serendipitous still life have I missed?

This is a completely new style of project for me, but I'm pretty excited about it. You just can't plan the kinds of scenes that a child creates, and it wouldn't be as fun if you tried. To wax Freudian for a moment, I think that my "Dream House" project (the title makes more sense when you see the images I can't post yet) is about the "uncanny" experience of looking at the kind of imaginative world that growing up tends to make us forget.

Yeah, Marc. whatever. Save it for the "artist's statement."