Printed in conjunction with the exhibition Personal Histories at Through the Flower from March 13- Apr 30, 1988
The work in Personal Histories can be considered idiosyncratic. In each piece, experience is transfigured through various media to create work that addresses universal concerns: human relationships, the impact of family, cultural heritage and popular values on social structure, the effects on human beings of day-to-day or life-and-death encounters. The carefully constructed scenarios represented here in performance, books, two-dimensional and three-dimensional formats begin with a life encounter but in completed form provide greater understanding of the complex issues of self in relation to world.
This is made possible through the artists’ sharing of explicitly personal material by means of formal structure and medium. Spading Gray touched on this power of the personal when he wrote, “I know there are certain stories that through repeated telling, begin both to give me pleasure and, at the same time, to help me make sense of my life. I talk to you both to entertain you and to find out what I think and feel about the way things are. Like all creative acts, it starts as something purely personal and works when it reaches something personal in you.” -Publisher