My father owned the second largest scrap yard in Detroit. The scene in Goldfinger where they crushed a guy inside a car turning both into a coffee table sized cube was almost filmed there because Eastern Iron & Metal was one of the only two junkyards in the country that owned the crusher machine. As a kid I used to spend Saturdays climbing massive piles of sinks and toilets, newspapers and comic books and cars stacked ten high. The shapes and textures of everything as well as imagining who owned every object fascinated me. My father was never comfortable with me having one of the largest collections of kitsch and 1950’s-70’s artifacts in the world because to him it was “$22 a ton”. But my days in the junkyard are at the very root of my obsession with kitsch. My house is filled with it. My style of dress informed by it. My fascination with certain types of people defined by it. Musically it puts me in a trance. And, before my discovery of Bubbles the artist, my art was layered with it. My interest in Bubbles developed, in fact, because she could unabashedly embrace kitsch which, compounded with her own sense of style, brought me back to wanting to create Art after spending the 90’s in technology land.
