James Preston Allen

It is perhaps the accumulation of the small things that mount up in one’s life that contain the most significance when taken as a whole. It’s the little stuff that adds up over time, the things we don’t consider important but really they do. These little things often represent the thoughts or impressions that we dismiss day to day as being extraneous or superfluous, but in the end, accumulated, they mount up to be colossal. Sometimes they are the mistakes we regret, other times the debilitating fears or the long held passions we attempt to repress. They exist right next to us, each hiding in the corners casting longing shadows on the things we admit to–they run as a subconscious stream underneath what we touch and say. 

The contents of these boxes and tins contain the contents of these distractions of life, which when collected together seem to draw their meanings like poems or songs as metaphors on the passage of life, embedded with intended but unintentional acts of habitual, excessive and compulsive construction and collecting. They are visual poems whispered in the eyes of the viewer, like a gift to a lost one who never returns.  View them in the Gallery