I was inspired and obsessed, a ghost in the shadows.

I lust after grid/graph paper. I think I can pinpoint my obsession down to the second that it happened. It was during a trip that my art class took to Chicago, my senior year of high school (around November 2006). We went to a few museums that day, but the one exhibition that really took a hold of me (not including the So The Story Goes exhibition, featuring work by Sally Mann and Tina Barney), was the Focus exhibition. This exhibition documented over 50 of Mel Bochner's works, which combined visual art and language. His work, which was largely on grid paper, used the uniformity of the squares and the emotion of words to create visual art. Since seeing his work, it has always been in the back of my head, although today is the first time that I tried to track it down again. I've always had these vague images in the back of my head, these fuzzy recollections that didn't form definitive pictures of what his work looked like, but rather reminded me of what it felt like.

Today, in my science lab, I tried to capture that emotion. I mean, I failed. But I tried. And that's sometimes the hardest part for me.