THE OPPOSITE OF LONELINESS: AN EXPERIMENT IN INSTUTIONAL AMNESIA
FALL 2O23
INSPIRED BY THE OPPOSITE OF LONELINESS
FULL BOOK HERE
The worst thing about going to Yale is that one day you won’t anymore. One day in May I’m going to wake up and lose swipe access to the opposite of loneliness itself, and all I will have to show for the happiest years of my life so far will be a sad piece of paper and a sadder piece of plastic with an embarrassing photo from high school.
This project is my attempt to cope with my premature grief at leaving this place. From picnic blankets out on Cross Campus to the walk of shame back home from Bass, I created posters that seek to memorialize shared experiences deeply specific to Yale College — the good, the bad, the infuriating, the spiritually awakening, the acutely, heart-wrenchingly cringeworthy and above all the opposite of lonely. My posters invite you to come and draw anything (yes, anything) on the walls of this campus, without anyone’s permission. To leave your mark, if only for a little while, on an institution physically and systemically designed to forget you.
This experiment didn’t last very long. Despite my best efforts to track them down and keep them up, many of my posters didn’t last more than a day. Some were simply thrown in the trash. To no one’s surprise, Yale is very, very protective of its walls — even when what one puts on the wall is something of a love letter to Yale itself, when freshmen write we’ll be okay and seniors write I love you and when strangers reach out on Instagram to tell me that they read one of my posters in its entirety and felt a sense of connection or comfort somehow. But maybe that’s exactly the point: our college years are ours and only ours, and they are so cruelly and beautifully short. Maybe that’s what makes them so special.
This experience was, among other things: a semi-public art project, a social experiment, an act of civil disobedience, an act of self-care, an expression of grief, an exercise in futility and the materialization of my childish and irrational urge to scribble my name all over the walls of this campus in crayon. All I have left of it is the handful of posters I managed to salvage, this imperfect and intensely redacted record of my (failed) battle with the Yale bureaucracy, and half a pack of red solo cups.
We don’t have a word for the opposite of loneliness. At least we have this.
This project is my attempt to cope with my premature grief at leaving this place. From picnic blankets out on Cross Campus to the walk of shame back home from Bass, I created posters that seek to memorialize shared experiences deeply specific to Yale College — the good, the bad, the infuriating, the spiritually awakening, the acutely, heart-wrenchingly cringeworthy and above all the opposite of lonely. My posters invite you to come and draw anything (yes, anything) on the walls of this campus, without anyone’s permission. To leave your mark, if only for a little while, on an institution physically and systemically designed to forget you.
This experiment didn’t last very long. Despite my best efforts to track them down and keep them up, many of my posters didn’t last more than a day. Some were simply thrown in the trash. To no one’s surprise, Yale is very, very protective of its walls — even when what one puts on the wall is something of a love letter to Yale itself, when freshmen write we’ll be okay and seniors write I love you and when strangers reach out on Instagram to tell me that they read one of my posters in its entirety and felt a sense of connection or comfort somehow. But maybe that’s exactly the point: our college years are ours and only ours, and they are so cruelly and beautifully short. Maybe that’s what makes them so special.
This experience was, among other things: a semi-public art project, a social experiment, an act of civil disobedience, an act of self-care, an expression of grief, an exercise in futility and the materialization of my childish and irrational urge to scribble my name all over the walls of this campus in crayon. All I have left of it is the handful of posters I managed to salvage, this imperfect and intensely redacted record of my (failed) battle with the Yale bureaucracy, and half a pack of red solo cups.
We don’t have a word for the opposite of loneliness. At least we have this.
POSTERS INSTALLED SITE-SPECIFICALLY AROUND YALE — WORDS CHANGE WITH LOCATION. DEFACEMENT FROM FRIENDS AND STRANGERS ENCOURAGED.
SELECTED POSTERS
33” X 48” EACH
I RECORDED EVERY CONVERSATION PERTAINING TO MY POSTERS OVER THE SPAN OF A WEEK IN A 76 PAGE BOOK AND HID COPIES ALL OVER YALE. CONTAINS TEXT MESSAGES, INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPTS, ART SUPPLY STORE RECEIPTS, NOTES, SCANNED YDN ARTICLES, REDACTED INFORMATION AND ANNOTATIONS FROM FRIENDS AND STRANGERS.
76 PAGES
5.5” X 8.5”
EDITION OF 10
PRINTED AT TYCO PRINTING
DESIGNED USING MICROSOFT WORD AND A SCANNER
