Pallet
Pallet was first conceived of in the Spring of 2007 when I was finishing my MFA thesis work and coincidentally, had just started working for Tucson Art Center Design College (TACDC).
My thesis project was a sculptural work of art that was made up of around three dozen pieces of pine wood boards designed for construction that were manually hand sanded through 2500 grit
sandpaper, which left them with a glass like finish. The work began as a play on the concept of “pining,” with the objects representing a manifestation of an ultimately unfruitful labor of love and longing. Each piece was beautiful and unique but remained autonomous from the other pieces - creating nothing in the end other than existing simply as a marker of time spent. I thought of the pallet idea right as I was finishing the thesis work. It would engage the same process but be somewhat of a departure from the primary concept of longing, but still manifest as an ordinary utilitarian object that had been transformed through an act of care. It exists as a very convert precious object in it’s finished form.
Ultimately I really liked the poetics of taking something that is a non-thing for all intents and purposes; the pallet is a means for moving things that have value - barely existing as a thing in
itself. And then making that non-entity and making it the very subject deserving of attention.
I stole this pallet, it’s a beverage pallet - which has the specific size of 36”x36” as opposed to the more typical 48”x 48” for purely aesthetic purposes. It was stolen from a dirt lot near a loading dock on East Toole Ave in downtown Tucson in the fall of 2007. When I took it into my possession it wasn’t in terrible shape, but had some marring, cracks, general imperfections. I took it apart as carefully as possible, trying not to damage it any more than it already had been and then hand planed and sanded the individual pieces using a simple razor plane, sanding block and sandpaper ranging from about 60 grit to 2500. Finally, I cleaned the pieces, applied a very very conservative sheen of tung oil and reassembled using stainless steel screws rather than nails. The process of making the piece was slow and it was ultimately finished sometime around the end of 2009.
Pallet was sold to Olivier Mosset, during the first exhibition at the Tucson Museum of Contemporary Art in it's (new) permanent location in 2010. Mosset placed the Pallet in the care of Tucson MOCA, which is a non-collecting institution, and it has been displayed on site there intermittently since.