WIJITS
The Story Behind WIJITS:
When a Memory Becomes a Muse
A forgotten artifact, a persistent haunting, and a new chapter in my Frequency Aesthetic series.
Mystery often surrounds the creative process. If you’re anything like me, you’ve wondered what inspires an artist to create this or that artwork. There are as many answers to that question as there are artworks. Allow me to pull back the curtain on creativity and give you a little insight into my process.
Personally, I have some core drivers behind my creative work, but sometimes it’s something else entirely—what I call a persistent haunting. By that I mean an idea or an image gets into my mind and simply won’t go away. I’m not always certain how it got there; perhaps that’s the mysterious part. The idea or image grows in my subconscious until it breaks through into my conscious mind. At that point—whether I can make sense of it or not—the idea must be exercised and fleshed out.
That is exactly what happened with my brand-new series I’m calling WIJITS.
Let’s go back to my youth for some context. I grew up with a pretty basic and austere existence—normal working-class stuff. We didn’t have many luxuries, but I had two brothers, some friends, and a radio. We had a TV but weren’t allowed to watch it much. We mostly played outside and passed the time with magic kits, board games… and music.
I loved listening to the radio whenever I got the chance. My parents had an extensive record collection and a record console that I would commandeer from time to time, spinning my dad’s Beach Boys albums, Johnny Cash, and Elvis—of course, Elvis. As I got older and got my own record player, I started choosing my own records. There was no shortage of incredible options from the ’70s and ’80s. Dare I say, it was the best period for rock and pop-rock music ever.
On weekends, I would huddle up next to my radio and listen to the Top 40 countdown. On Friday nights, I listened to the local rock station’s “Basement Tapes” show and made mix tapes to play on my cassette player when the DJ’s selections weren’t to my liking. I was gifted a Steve Miller Band Greatest Hits cassette for a birthday, which I played ad nauseam—until I got my second tape.
With the little money I gathered from birthdays or house chores, I slowly built my own music collection. My first purchase was either Boston’s debut album or Aerosmith’s Toys in the Attic—I can’t remember which came first. I kept building my collection and shaping my musical taste through the radio and conversations with my friend group, the original social network.
For the money, a 33 rpm record was the best value. But from time to time, I’d find a single that really resonated. Singles were released on 45s (IYKYK). This was for those moments when I only liked one song from an album and didn’t want to spring for the whole record. Forty-fives were much cheaper than albums, but you only got one song, plus a bonus track on the B-side. Forty-fives were smaller than full-length LPs, and ironically, the hole that held them on the turntable was larger than the one on 33s.
Most turntables came standard with a small center pin for playing 33s. Enter the WIJIT—or so I called this little piece of plastic engineering. My whole life, I knew this little plastic thingy as a “widget,” only to find out (embarrassingly) not long ago that I was the only one who called it that. The proper, official, and—might I say—boring and uninspired name is… wait for it… the 45 record adapter.
There were, and still are, several configurations of the 45 record adapter, but the iconic one—the one that says, “Play That Funky Music, White Boy” (again, IYKYK)—is the thin, yellow, spidery-looking one. The image of that thing has been appearing to me so frequently over the past year that I finally decided to give it the attention it deserves.
After considerable thought, I felt that it—an icon of my generation and a representative artifact of a dying medium—deserved a spotlight. That little yellow nugget represents strong memories from my youth that I’m sure I share with many of you. It is part of an industry and culture that placed value on the effect music could have on us—bringing us together based on shared musical interests, or dividing us by them. Music gives a voice to communities, crosses economic boundaries, creates emotions, and anchors memories of places and experiences.
My Frequency Aesthetic series explores the effect that sound—particularly music—has on our emotions, psychology, and physiology. So it made perfect sense to add WIJITS to my oeuvre as another exploration of sound, music, memory, community, unity, and identity.