"What I learned in 2011." -Charles Youel, ARTCRANK Founder, Director & Curator

Roughly one year ago, I woke up in our house at 2:00am to the smell of smoke. Not the warm, woody, fire-in-the-fireplace kind of smoke, but the acrid, searing, burning-plastic kind. It’s somewhat amazing that I was the one who noticed it: my wife, who wrinkles her nose when the neighbor’s cat farts, swears that I have no sense of smell at all. In retrospect, the fact that I had to pee probably had something to do with it.

We live in a one-and-a-half story bungalow, and our bedroom is on the top floor. By the time I got to the main floor and turned on a light, I could see a thin veil of smoke gathering at the ceiling. By the time I followed the smoke to the basement stairwell, it was thick enough that I couldn’t see the bottom of the stairs. It took three more steps to establish that whatever was going on down there was more than I could handle in my underwear.

I woke up our friend who was staying with us because the power in her neighborhood was out. I woke up my wife and asked her to get our two dogs out of the house. I pulled on a pair of pants, a t-shirt and a pair of shoes. Then, on my way out the front door, I called 911 and in my best imitation of a calm, cool and collected voice explained that our house was on fire.

A short time later, we stood shivering on the sidewalk and watched men and women with oxygen tanks and axes move purposefully into our house. When you know that the people (and the dogs) you love the most are safe, your mind wanders to everything else you’re afraid of losing. So I turned to my wife and said, “I hope we don’t lose the posters.”

“The posters” being several hundred handmade, bike-inspired prints collected from ARTCRANK shows dating back to 2007. One copy of every poster that’s ever been in a show, more or less. I’ve been saving them with the idea of doing a book someday. Everything else in the house I could think of could be replaced. But not the posters.

I’ll skip ahead in story and tell you that we didn’t lose the posters, or anything else, save the dryer and everything that was in it. A few electrons jump where they shouldn’t, and the next thing you know, your entire house smells like Satan’s underpants.

In the days and weeks that followed, we watched as the cleaning crew the insurance company brought in hauled out box after box and bag after bag of stuff from our basement. I say “stuff” because that’s what it was: piles of undifferentiated objects pulled from boxes and bins that hadn’t been opened in years. Stuff we’d forgotten we even owned.

Since then, most of that stuff has been donated, sold, recycled or tossed — an approach we’ve started to take with pretty much everything in our house that isn’t meaningful or essential. If you ever want to kick-start the process of simplifying your life, I highly recommend a small, manageable house fire.

One year later, I still have a few hundred posters in my basement. In fact, I’ve added a couple hundred more with the shows we did in 2011. And if our house catches fire tonight, I will do exactly what I did 12 months ago, more or less. So in that sense I guess you could say I haven’t learned anything.

What I learned this year doesn’t fit in my basement. Or on my laptop. Or as it turns out, in this story. Except to say that whatever it was, I can’t wait to update, amend, contradict, confuse, replace or erase it with what’s next.

Charles K. Youel
Founder, Director & Curator
ARTCRANK