POOR KELSEY HARRISON…WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?: KELSEY HARRISON

I can’t account for what happened on my last drive home from the sales office in the Cozumel model home. After I was fired, I loaded my car with my belongings from the office (see my catalogue) and drove home totally preoccupied. Given my complete distraction, I can’t relay to you how I ended up on that island alone and wrecked—I can’t string together the events that lead to my inconvenient perdition. All I can tell you is that it happened, that it sucked, and that I learned nothing. When you’re wrecked alone on an island for 4 days, you could learn a lot about yourself. But mostly, it’s boring. It’s hot in the day and cold at night and nothing happens if you complain about it. Your computer runs out of batteries. So does your phone. So does your oculus and your drone, so you can’t even see anything on the island. You can’t find food anywhere.

You know what’s most annoying about the island? It doesn’t matter where anything goes. Like you can put anything anywhere and it will always not be put away. Like you can’t…it’s hard to explain. But the same is true of yourself. You can be anywhere because you don’t belong anywhere in particular. I was on my island for 4 whole days, bored out of my mind, but I think I could have done longer. I think I could have made it work. At Daybreak, the master-planned community I worked at, we used to say to potential buyers, “Let the community grow up around you!” It may be cheesy, but it makes them feel brave for settling the frontier. Well, this could have been my frontier since I was the king of the place. I could have done it—settled the hell out of that place, made roads, made houses, places for stuff and people to go. But I got picked up, and so I didn’t. I also didn’t bring a hammer or anything. Anyways, I present you with the shit I had on hand with which I had to reproduce my life as I knew it.

Kelsey Harrison is a Salt Lake City based sculptor. Her work has been shown in institutions nationally including The Jewish Museum, Abrons Art Center, and The Knockdown Center in New York, SOMArts in San Francisco, The Sullivan Galleries in Chicago and The College of William and Mary in Virginia. Harrison received her BFA in Sculpture from Purchase College, State University of New York and her MFA in Sculpture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

photography by David Yun