Good day collectors, and happy Wednesday to you. There's a hint of Spring in the air here in NYC today, not in a weather-gone-mad, global warming kind of way, but rather in a "let's step out for lunch and leave our coats unzipped and ditch the wooly accessories" kind of way. It's a beautiful thing, and if I'm lucky I'll get to do just that after I tell you all about today's photography edition.

You might have noticed that our artists have a penchant for Untitled when it comes to titling their works, and the creator of today's edition Jessica Bruah continues the tradition. Her Untitled is from a series called Stories, which I have been reading, so to speak, since early 2006. Jessie's earlier stories were exhibited at the gallery during the Winter 2006 edition of Hey, Hot Shot!

As regular 20x200 readers know, I love photos that tell stories, and what I find particularly enchanting about Ms. Bruah's work is the surrealist bent to the ones that she frames. While it's clear that every element of each image has been obsessively thought through, their assemblage is always off-kilter and often fantastical. Everyday things are unmoored from their usual stations, and with that unmooring I find myself constructing similarly loopy plotlines.

In this particular image, Jessie employs the seemingly endless creative potential of the humble (yet mighty!) Post-It note. I am a Post-It note fan, and am invariably delighted by Post-It note art. Post-Its + art + narrative? That adds up to art-y bliss for me.

Post-It notes and other office supplies always make me think of a Theodore Roethke poem, Dolor. I've included the poem below, because I think it's great; it perfectly (and timelessly) captures the tedium of the worker-bee life. The narrative that I've built around today's photo involves its heroine succumbing to a madness induced by the office tedium that Roethke so deftly describes.

Fortunately for me, 20x200 HQ is a tedium-free zone. We are having an awfully good time working with artists and getting the art out to all you happy, art-loving people. Who knew that work could be this fun? And with that: I'm off to have some fun!

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Dolor

I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils,
Neat in their boxes, dolor of pad and paper weight,

All the misery of manila folders and mucilage,
Desolation in immaculate public places,
Lonely reception room, lavatory, switchboard,
The unalterable pathos of basin and pitcher,
Ritual of multigraph, paper-clip, comma,

Endless duplication of lives and objects.
And I have seen dust from the walls of institutions,
Finer than flour, alive, more dangerous than silica,
Sift, almost invisible, through long afternoons of tedium,

Dropping a fine film on nails and delicate eyebrows,
Glazing the pale hair, the duplicate grey standard faces.

***