Time, and life, stream by, without a moment for contemplation. It’s hard to recall what happened yesterday, or in this morning’s dreams. It’s as if we're lost within our own stories or, sometimes, as if there is no story at all. I’ve tried in various ways to capture the relentless assault of experience, including photo-taking, memento-collecting, and journal-writing. But even when carried out diligently these methods are inadequate. They can’t always capture the shocking, disruptive impact of small moments, and the deeper shifts in mood that underline the weeks. They don’t get it.
Riitta Ikonen’s warm and rigorous conceptual art project Mail Art, gets a great deal of it. Over the past several years, once every week, she has mailed an A5 format “postcard” to a professor at an art school she attended in Brighton, England. They’re dispatched from wherever she happens to be that week, and crafted from whatever materials she has on hand. She’s sent over two hundred of them so far, all of which her professor has saved and returned to her. Ikonen has a liberated graphic sensibility: she has mailed, among other things: a stone, the sole of a boot, a stack of MetroCards, and a chunk of little fish sealed in glue. Each missive is packaged, titled, addressed and stamped distinctively yet unfussily. When taken together, as they were at an exhibit last year, the postcards make up a vibrant personal, physical and psychic history. They’re alive with the tactility and pungency of everyday experience.