LOOK 0725: Postcards
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This summer was defined by postcards. Not so much the part about where I have been and what I have been doing but more like memories; memories sent and received, delicately written on a 4x6 piece of artwork and shipped across the world. It was a summer about moving forward, really. And that's precisely what a postcard is. It's a forward movement of a past memory, shared or not, of something that has been. But the thing about a postcard is that you can touch it, you can feel it, you can read it and in a world of clouds and data and intangible things, the giving and receiving of a long-travelled piece of paper somehow makes life good again.
Postcards make you slow down, especially if you love to run. They make you realize that some things are just meant to exist, nothing more. Like the people in your life are just meant to be loved and treated with kindness, nothing more. Or the art you make is just meant to sit in your living room. We don't send enough postcards in today's world to expect one in return- and that's what makes them great. I wonder, how obsolete does something have to become for it to lose its transactional expectation? Cause we can use more of that. Postcards, though slow moving, always travel towards a destination. But the certainty that it gets there, well that depends on which middle-of-nowhere country you end up in. And sometimes they never arrive. But that doesn't necessarily mean a memory lost, perhaps just one with no end. Thick Mint has been a floating postcard for a while- a chronicle of projects that have no real meaning or purpose but just happen to exist and find their meanings later. Each shirt design or new collection is simply a moment of Thick Mint's here and now. Designs take meaning after they have been created, usually where they've first been worn and photographed like on the side of a Kauai highway or through the fog up Kona's mountains. They become not so much about what is on it but where it eventually arrives- a forward moving, past memory: a postcard. So, send a postcard, expect nothing in return, live transaction-less and give your best. Be kind, make someone laugh, maybe even be the reason they send a postcard in the first place. Give yourself the grace of not a memory lost but perhaps just one with no end. |
