Everything's Gone Green.

Last weekend was the tenth and final installment of Zoe Strauss' I-95 show. This is how it went down.

I have a system. Thankfully, it almost always fails. For the last four years, I've taken three or four passes through Zoe Strauss' I-95 show. The first pass involves looking at every image. The following trips through the pillars are looser, a ramble really. That's when the show really kicks in. Patterns start to appear in Strauss' arrangement of the photographs. Pairs of photos are in conversation across from each other, while entire rows of work dip and weave around each other. There's a lot of movement.

The other thing that would happen in the later passes is that I'd start to keep an eye on the finale. The shows lasted 3 hours. At the end, everybody who wishes to peels a print off its perch and takes it home. Walking through I would start to find favorites, and narrow down my choices. This is where the system invariably and gloriously would fail. I never left with what I thought I'd be leaving with in the beginning. Surprises would pop up that I hadn't noticed while perusing Zoe's selections online beforehand. Or, more likely, by the time I went to stake out my first choice somebody had beaten me to it. This has always turned out to be a good thing, because it kept me honest. If I hadn't been following my gut up until then, I was made keenly aware of it by necessity.

This time was like that. It was 3:30. There was a half hour to go, and Fairbanks Truck and Whittier Basketball Court made up my short list. I started walking towards the former when I ran into a couple people from Zoe's NY gallery. When I turned back toward the photo I saw that someone else had beaten me to it. By the time I got to the Basketball Court, it too had been staked out. The moment of truth kicked in like a train. My first two choices had been academic, but there was an image that had stayed with me all afternoon. I rushed over to it, and as soon as I got there I knew I was in the right place. One of the abstracts, it was all color, angles, and shadows. Game over. Heart full. This was the place. Everything had gone green. Again.

I-95 might have ended at that moment, but it won't be leaving me anytime soon. That shit is forevah.