Ten years ago this month I showed the piece that first taught me how I could rationalize questionable accumulation of stuff by making it “part of the project”. It was an installation of nonsensically interconnected nonworking electronics, Plastic (Machine). Or something like that, I kept changing the title trying to make it tie into different things over time.

It was one of three works tied together through the vague idea of systems. The other two were a construction set of cutup trees, and a series of eight large iterative line drawings on canvas.

These were presented at my high school’s portfolio day, an event where admissions representatives from dozens of postsecondary art/design programs drive or fly into this particular Toronto suburb to interview sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds who have set up installations all through the school building. Memorably, my friend Griffin McAllister turned the boiler room into a sort of cave covered in his ink drawings. My setup was in a cavernous dance studio I’d never even seen in my four years at the school, across from photos by my friend Lucy Stamler.

The government has experimented with admissions to high school programs like this one in a way that has apparently been detrimental, and visual arts department head Matthew Varey has since left, but it’s important to say upfront that this all took place at a free public school and the thing happened entirely through the determination of the teachers and students.

I was applying for industrial design programs, but the pieces I showed were all firmly on the art side of things, whether or not they had the ineffable quality that should ideally come along with that. At the time I had thought that these iterative line drawings I had been doing would be my main focus. They were something I had to go through regardless of how interesting or not they seem now.

The first of these drawings started as a sort of cartoonish mountain, and I just kept adding more lines until that contour disappeared into a vibrating field of accreted layers. I had finally figured out how to make a break from representation and I clung tightly to that personal victory. These drawings had a cut-and-dried logic and looked good in a historicist way. I unexpectedly sold a couple, and figured out how to make them a bit more painterly over time. They were shown later that winter, alongside paintings by my classmate Flora Aldridge, in a show curated by an older graduate of the high school who has since achieved viral success for a particular style of acrobatic AbEx on spinning canvasses.

But the drawings started to make me uncomfortable in how imposing and ordered they were, and I noticed they were starting to give people an unrealistic idea of my personality. Aside from that, I realized at a party a few months later that it wasn’t much fun to draw like this when I was relaxed, so I began the long search for looser methods of drawn and painted abstraction. In a bit of a self-aggrandizing way I began telling people that I’d rather have software make those iterative drawings so I could move on. This is one of many ideas I had at the time that I can’t get with now.

There were two main points in making Plastic (Machine). The first was to gather an array of objects with some formal tendency that I wanted to incorporate into my work. The second was to instinctively “connect” them in ways that didn’t do anything and didn’t make rational sense. That second goal is harder to explain, except that I guess I found it funny to have ethernet cables coming out the back of a typewriter or to position a power brick alone at the end of a cable as though it were a self-sufficient product. I set up a version of the installation once afterwards at York University and didn’t pay attention much to replicating particular connections. This was an early lesson in cultivating spontaneity when installing, something I’ve enjoyed ever since.

The most common question about the installation was “does it do something”. It didn’t, and I don’t know if this letdown was as theoretically sound as I told myself at the time. Maybe there should have been a button that made everything light up and beep and spin. After all, once I took this entirely static installation apart, plenty of these electronics went right back into daily use, working just fine without some convoluted outside logic imposed on them.

At the time, I probably would have preferred all the constituent parts of Plastic (Machine) to be 50s–60s Braun and 2000s Apple: a Euro-Californian modern vision. But because of what was available in area Value Villages and Goodwills plus farm auctions out of town, a lot of objects had weirder, more specific individual personalities. A motel starburst alarm clock with the gold promotional sticker still on top, the lowest-end Kodak 126 camera, a 90s Braun coffee grinder (production outsourced to Mexico). An identifiable American cheapness clung to many of these objects even as I reached for something uniform.

By definition, every single object from this installation is ten years older today — meaning some have doubled in age — but I don’t think they feel particularly more historicized or removed from life to me now than they already did at the time.

The tree building blocks felt like they should go back outside afterwards. They sat for years lined up on the ground at the cottage, refusing to gracefully decompose the way I’d expected. I finally carried them out to the big rock, piling them slightly apart from the other firewood, and by next summer they should be bleached dry.