An interactive mail art project and intervention, Holding a Candle to Your Ghost consisted of hundreds of postcards inscribed with a mysterious message and mailed or placed strategically around the University of Chicago campus. The project began when I received a postcard in the mail from an unknown sender with a message addressed to someone named Ningqi, the same message replicated and disseminated on the Holding a Candle postcards. The message affected me deeply as simultaneously intimate and absurdly generic. Amplifying and re-broadcasting the message’s clichés and generalities — which can nonetheless hold deep meaning for the recipient — is a study in foiled intimacy. In accepting spiritual guidance from the blue, I seek to examine my absurd attachments to strangers.
Participants were and are still invited to respond if they so desire. We are still looking for Ningqi.
View of both sides of postcards. Silkscreen print on offset printed paper cards, 4” x 6”.