Joseph Havel | Sentimental Journey, 2011 - 2014

My name is Joseph Havel and I live most of the year in Houston, Texas, in a church that doubles as my studio. When I'm not in Houston, Texas, I live in Menerbes, which is a Provence in the south of France. My work in general is based on domestic objects and narratives, things that come out of my daily life that can be put in a different context to take on new meanings. These meanings can be both personal or social or political or economic or environmental but the idea is that they connect with individuals in a poetic matter rather than a directly declarative way. The triptych that is at The Lancaster is based on shirt labels in each of the Plexiglass boxes. There are approximately 22,000 shirt labels in each Plexiglass box. Dimensions of the shirt label are based on the first white shirt that I ever bought, which was purchased when I became the director of the Glassell School about 30 years ago. I then worked with a commercial label weaver for high-end fashion shirts in Dallas, Texas. I chose the words that are on each one of those labels from the book "The Dream Songs" by John Berryman, which is a book of poems. This book was incredibly influential, particularly early on in my work, but remains a kind of touchstone for me. John Berryman was a professor at the University of Minnesota where I went to undergraduate school, and just prior to me going to school there, he passed away. He jumped off a bridge, actually, but I became familiar with his work from a reading. Anyway, these words are taken photocopied out of the original book and each one of them is then woven, individually, onto those labels so that they work as single-word poems or, in a triptych, they also work as a kind of three-worded poem, but they're not originally available initially they are muffled by being stacked in the manner that they are in the Plexiglas boxes. Once you look at the boxes carefully and you see clues that there are narrative elements, you can look along the edges of the boxes to see that what the words are and so it has this delay built into the piece.