Receipt Bread started years before the idea came to mind. From my years of collaging, I began to collect receipts from special events: a lunch just between my dad and I, a spontaneous and laughter filled night over a meal of fried chicken, groceries for special meals, tutoring receipts my mom told me to keep as a kid to pay her pay when I am an adult, etc.. And when I would look back to the scattered receipts taped into my collaged notebooks, I’d recall the tender, warm joy I felt from those events. Variation in typographic design became another characteristic in interest. One day, I decided to count to 100 through my receipts’ order numbers. I never made it to 100, but I kept collecting receipts. During lockdown of the pandemic (late 2020), I taped all my receipts together, extending 13 x 6 ft.

In fall of 2021, the concept of receipt bread was born. This project, I could stand by. Laminating each receipt by land required six months. It felt like a burial of the past, covering one transaction through this ritual of preparatory thin glue layer, careful placement, then burial thin glue layer. I let go of my most precious receipts, memories I wanted to hold on to. I let them become blurred with the hundreds of mundane receipts: grocery, gas, medicine, parking fees, etc.. The lengthy time amassed to its celebratory end, the termination of loaf to slices by bandsaw.

Like the commercialized white loaf bread, its mass production

Memory unfolds before me

Typographic imprints of currency, exchange, consumption 

From one mundane run to the groceries

A lunch between my father and I

Days filled with love

Of a past I once lived

A gentle reminder of the joyous events

A time we came together over hot meals and ice cream dates

Holding onto memory and time in our lives

Saturated with capital value

A material transaction 

The receipt prints

Folds over

Dangles and drips

A quick snare

And toss into the graves

Again

Again 

Once More

Endlessly 

2022

Receipts, Glue