Tag: books
2012 – Heirloom
“the things we leave behind”
art by: erin kathryn morrill, carol bontekoe, tyler gillespie
reading: from Dirty Socks and Pine Needles by tyler gillespie
when: Friday, July 13 ( 7 – 9:30PM)
where: Holy Covenant United Methodist Church
(925 W Diversey Parkway, Chicago, IL 60614)
Heirloom is a three-person show presented by erin kathryn morrill, carol bontekoe, and tyler gillespie. The selected work navigates the concept of urban family by using photography, painting, a
In keeping with the theme of the urban family, Heirloom is designed to be a family reunion of sorts – a place where potluck meets poetry. nd text.
There will be food and alcohol, but people are encouraged to bring their favorite dishes. Don’t be like that free-loading uncle who comes and gets drunk for free and never gets invited back!
tyler gillespie/25/FL
Dirty Socks and Pine Needles (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2012) is a mythography – it’s a fictitious biography of my life. My work intentionally blurs the distinction between what is remembered (memory) and what actually happened (reality). The text self-indulgently explores my obsession with memory; it’s about family, but more importantly it’s about how family informs the perception of self.
buy e-book here
“Laundry Day” (2012)
[clothesline, socks, paper]
“Laundry Day” is a visual representation of memory. The installation is a composite of each story in Dirty Socks and Pine Needles; the handwritten stories are and hung up sequentially by clothespins.
The viewer is encouraged to transform the piece by buying or stealing or somehow TAKING the stories/memories and replacing them with a sock. The objective is to see how the narrative of memory is irrevocably changed by time and other people. We are forced to question what is inherently missing in a person’s memory narrative.
“In Dirty Socks and Pine Needles, Tyler Gillespie elegantly uses his storytelling to weave his strange, off-kilter childhood memories into a collection of melancholic beauty. Gillespie’s stories are brave, honest, and seamlessly told with an innocence that has the ability to unlock the dark memories most have buried in their consciousness. There is no better talent than turning heartache into beauty and with Dirty Sock and Pine Needles, Gillespie has mastered this art flawlessly.”
— Franki Elliot, author of Piano Rats
buy dirty socks and pine needles here. write a review!
My debut book Dirty Socks and Pine Needles was released today! My publisher released it two weeks early, because it is “a good way for readers to start the summer.
I am so excited for people to read it.
Check it out here
It’s $2.99
“We do not choose our family. We love them or want to love them. We embrace them or run from them. We leave them or become them.
Through it all, we are linked by the commonality of a shared blood, and in Dirty Socks and Pine Needles, a sweet and funny eBook single from Sibling Rivalry Press, Tyler Gillespie explores that link by way of the intricate relationships between parent and child, grandmother and grandson, grandfather and grandson, nephew and uncle, and older and younger brother.
The resulting vignettes paint a portrait of a family and the tender-hearted boy at its center, whose first images of himself come from the reflections of those around him.”
“When I was a child, I memorized my mother’s hands as she folded clothes.
My favorite smell is clean laundry, because
it reminds me of my mother and Saturdays spent at the laundry mat watching my clothes tumble
instead of in the living room watching cartoons.
Everything is gonna be all right, she would sing in soap bubbles.”
from “my mother,” Dirty Socks and Pine Needles
Tyler Gillespie 