For the past couple of years, I’ve been going through my dad’s collections. For context, my family moved to Santiago de Chile in ’92 from L.A. — I was born there. My dad did cartoon voices. He worked with Hanna-Barbera Cartoons, and he married a Chilean, my mom. My father passed away in 2006; me and my mom are here, and my sister moved back to L.A. in 2019.
I’ve been going through my dad’s things — one, because I made the time. Two, because I felt like it was the appropriate moment to do so. It is a very emotional process, of course. Next year is going to be 20 years since he passed away. I’m 41 — I didn’t have him for very long. I have been sorting through the things, choosing what I’m going to keep for myself, what I’m going to give away. The journey of doing this has also had a lot to do with giving these things a second opportunity and a second life — getting them out of a warehouse or room or box and somebody actually using it and giving it a new meaning. There’s something symbolic and transformative about that that I have really enjoyed, and I didn’t expect it.
I have gone to garage sales and flea markets, and I just put my little stand there and make everything really nice. It’s fun to do the research, figure out what everything is, because I have all sorts of objects, like fossils and minerals and Avon thimbles from the ’80s and Japanese toys from the ’60s. I realized that I was doing so much work, taking pictures of and measuring everything. I was like, “This is art.” This is a project — this cannot be something that I’m doing on the side.
You will see in the work some stationery from my dad’s bookshop, which was on Melrose: “Lenny’s Book Nook: Unusual, used books bought and sold.” Part of what’s interesting to me is the fiction that you have to create when somebody passes away — you kind of fill in the blanks. And memory is very tricky in that sense, because somebody tells you something, and then you remember it in a certain way. That also informs the work, that strange way that memory functions. It’s interesting how, for example, my dad’s bookshop, I have remembered different things from it. I never went there. I just have a little bit of data. Art is a super fertile place to make associations because you create something that’s sort of parallel to reality.
I’ve also started new collections in the process. For example, I collect lists that I find when I go to the supermarket, and somebody just drops their list on the floor — I will always be the vacuum that will clean it up for those people. I find them endearing, like something that somebody made with absolutely no pretension for it to be art. And that is also something I love about stationery. It’s not meant to be artistic.
I am realizing the reason why I’m interested in making small format works right now has to do with the universe that I’m referencing, which, in the case of this series, are books, the old world of lists and stationery and discarded pieces of paper. I also realized how intimate drawing can be, and a lot of this subject matter is not very easy to talk about, it’s very personal and private. So the fact that it’s small has hit very close to home.
Going through boxes and going through things is incredibly messy. It’s not like everything fits neatly in a box. Like, “Oh, here is the sector with my father’s smoking pipes” — it doesn’t go like that at all. For example, the toys that I’ve been going through, they’re all over the place. I think that this series, in that sense, relates to that overlapping of things, the experience of going through things. I’m still looking at the works, but the overlapping and the transparencies of the papers that I’ve been using, it’s opened up something really new and interesting for me.
—As told to Elisa Wouk Almino
Grace Weinrib was born in Los Angeles and is an American Chilean visual artist and teacher. She currently lives and works in Santiago, Chile.
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