"The Secret Lives of Things"
The Secret Lives of Things is a year-long “call and response” project between writer Anita Skeen and artist Guillermo Delgado that is founded on old artistic traditions that exhibit parallel processes of creativity and expression. In practice and presentation, The Secret Lives of Things is a tool to accentuate the relationships and dichotomies between different meaning-making systems, including those visual and verbal in nature. As artists of different physical media and cognitive framing, Anita and Guillermo have highlighted the inherent convergences and divergences within these parallel processes.
The old-world qualities of the artistic communication are heightened by the technological publishing of the individual pieces from each artist that contribute to the finished twenty-six combined literary/visual works, rendered in blog form. As a tool to maintain friendship and collegiality across distance and time, the blog format has provided both artists with a range of feelings conveyed nearly-immediately into an automatic cyber-community. Bridging distance and time, our shared artistic dialogue exists within that broader community and continues in the call-and-response format inherent in a blog format, extending the notions of exhibition and constructivism into a collective realm.