Cosmo Girls

I do most of my furniture shopping in the alley and about twenty five years ago I found an old dresser that I took home. All I had at the time was a lot of black paint so that's the color I painted it. Eventually I painted the top and the handles light blue. It was used at various times by all of my kids but eventually ended up in the basement in my studio where it occupied a central location as a repository for my daughters' Barbie Doll collection and community. As one would expect, as my daughters grew up they visited Barbie less and less, and finally not at all. Meanwhile, the dresser remained where it was as my own clutter grew around it.
Recently as I was scrutinizing my studio's limited storage space I realized that if I removed the dresser I could actually create a lot more space. After so many years it was difficult to contemplate but with a heavy heart I placed Barbie and all her friends and contents into a plastic bin and emptied the dresser which I then took outside.
The dresser was quite old when found it and showed its age even more in the daylight. I couldn't bear to leave it in the alley destined for a landfill. But on the other hand because of its rickety condition I couldn't give it away either. So, what to do? As I was leaning on it one of the lose panels came off and before I knew it the old dresser more or less came apart with much of a fight. I kept the drawers because they were still in good condition and I noticed that there was not a sign of particle board anywhere to be found.
As I looked at the sides of the dresser they actually looked like small shelves, just big enough to support some smaller pieces. As I looked at some of the panels that had come off the back of the dresser I realized that if I cut them into squares they would fit on perfectly on the shelves. And that’s what I did.
But what to do with the squares once they were cut? A few months ago I had created some collages made from cutting apart pictures that I found in my daughters’ discarded Cosmopolitan magazines ( I assured them that I only looked at the pictures and read the articles). I loved the results. Using only the eyes, noses and mouths that I cut out magazines I painted and created collaged portraits that were at once cubist, abstract, and surreal, and quite beautiful, or so I thought. I decided to repeat the exercise using the wooden squares
What pleased most was that in the end the dresser was not discarded or wasted. Every bit or almost every bit of it was transformed into something entirely new, a different kind of energy.