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Joey Borovicka's studio is a room that can lead to any other room. He enters the other rooms through special portals he's fashioned by stretching canvas over wooden frames. He never knows what kind of room he'll end up in and he never happens to meet the people who live there, but he nevertheless takes the liberty of rummaging through their belongings, drinking their beer, and staring out their windows.

 

The people almost always seem like loners whose confinement serves only to enable their obsessions. He can tell they collect things, build things, and futz around as if what they’re doing really matters.

 

It’s easy for him to linger in these rooms for long stretches of time without realizing it. He’s stepped into my special portals when the trees outside my own window were blooming and stepped back out only to find them bare--whole seasons of his life down the drain. Sometimes he wonders whether the rooms he's visited are real. Other times they’re so real, his life feels like the thing he dreamt up.