The Poetics

In July of 2017, Matthew Connors and Lucy Ives embarked on this strange project to remove and catalog all the contents of Connors’s car, a 1992 Volvo 240 station wagon. Although they began the endeavor without knowing where it would lead, their investigation—of parts, tools, ephemera, litter, personal items, unidentifiable disjecta, among other objects—lasted more than two years and resulted in a series of photographs by Connors and an essay by Ives on narrative forms and temporalities inherent to contemporary media. This collaborative publication poses questions about where narrative originates and how we establish our stories in relation to the objects and timescales that carry, ground, and surround us.