If I Still Exist
by Daniel Sturniolo
June 2024
Original art by Daniel Sturniolo.
Collages? Macédoines? Drawings on newspaper with text sourced from the crossword clues, horoscope, and advice column? I’ve often wondered how to class these pieces when describing them in writing.
Whatever we’re calling them today, I didn’t start out making them for any marketplace. The first was spontaneous, and then they became a compulsion. Can I grab some piece of this ephemeral world to sustain me? As with everything, who the fuck knows.
Adopted at birth in the town Tom Waits left ‘at the slamming of a door’ and where Frank O’Hara had ‘all dreams of pleasantness’ wiped from his mind, I have always been a metaphysical émigré. (Waukegan, IL, did, however, produce the best-named baseball player ever, ‘Ugly’ Johnny Dickshot. One of his bats hangs on my wall, as a talisman.)
So my best explanation for why I make these things—or anything else really—is something the great lo-fi recording artist Bill Callahan (Smog) said in the early nineties: “I wanted to see if I still exist.”
