Suk’s Alteration & Cleaners $10.28 #ExactChange

There are three dry cleaners in my neighborhood but Suk’s is the only one I use. The owner is a very skilled seamstress and has altered many a thrift score find that was too long or two big. She also charges less than the other two stores which could be the real reason this cheap skate chooses Suk’s everytime.

I am not sure if I can sustain/justify spending #ExactChange on my dry cleaning, I was supposed to pick these up on Friday before I received the check from the VMFA, so it wouldn’t have had to come from this project. I don’t think dry-cleaning is a tax deductible expense, unless of course you write a Medium article about it as part of a larger writing project (see how I did that?)

My orange plaid shirt came from Fantastic Thrift in Richmond and the polka dotted pocket was added by my friend Mary Eisendrath, who was mending at the Institute for Contemporary Art at VCU as part of Lee Mingwei’s The Mending Project. I have know Mary for nearly five years and I never really had an opportunity to sit down and talk to her, apart from small talk at parties and openings. It was really great to sit down with her for an hour as she pulled out the stitches on my matching pocket and added multi-color polka dots in its place.

The question that many people ask when looking at contemporary art is “How is that Art?” which is really the wrong question. A better question is “Where is the Art?” Which in the case of Mingwei’s The Mending Project can be answered in a number of ways. “It’s in the ICA on the third floor” where location, context etc determines the “where” the art is. But for me the “where” is not a location it’s the interaction, it's the space between the artwork and the viewer. I like to think about trying to hold two polar opposite magnets together. That space in between is where the art is. In the case of my orange shirt, the shirt is definitely not the art, and to me the installations isn’t really the art either. For me the space between the magnets happens at the mending table when Mary and I sat across from each other and and talked about our journey’s to that moment. What made us the type of people who would happily spend our time this way, in the middle of the week, on a hot August day in 2018?

Suk’s medium starched my modified shirt and it looks like it belongs in a store front window display, or better yet an art museum.