12. 5. 18
Absence; amassment. Nearing both ends of the infinite spectrum of existence and nonexistence, and yet both, impermeably and indelicately, intertwined. As humans, as people-- objects ourselves-- we have an immeasurable relationship with the tangible and intangible, with memory and presence. We collect things. We lose things. We forget. We have rituals; we bastardize them-- we keep them going all the same. We the people are creatures of misremembered habit, of stuff, of body, of self and non-self alike.
My work examines, occasionally criticizes, and visually evaluates the flawed but ever-present tendency to hold onto things, dignifying object as record, or relic, of absence-- absent self, absent person, present/absent ritual. How, asks the cheshire cat, is the raven like a writing desk? How indeed-- and how the object like everything is isn’t— a record, of sorts, of what is not there? What relationship does the creek water in Grand Prairie— it was it Mitchell’s?— have, perhaps, to celery and marionettes, my own grandmother’s dresses, and her own mother’s, saved for 60 years, and to the four cast iron horses, the only thing her husband asked for by name the last year of his life? What agency do we give object, ritual, in our private and public lives, if any at all? Why do we remember things, seek them out, memorialize them, hold onto them?
I consider, often, the nature of record. Record-keeping. Mis-record. We humans keep record of millions of minutia; time-sheets, transcripts, receipts from a loaf of bread bought five years ago, uneaten. Accumulating and ammassing to a little more than-- or less than-- nothing at all. What is a life in terms of records of daily transactions, birthday cards, the sacred and the secular reduced to a pile of arbitrary words, inglorious remnants of events misremembered, increasingly arbitrary as time distances is from their origin event. Memory in the abstract marked by the amassing of increasingly useless markers
Absence as presence; the intimate space. Remnants of a life manufactured by a million people at once, where we’ve come to this seemingly universal agreement that socks, of all things, are necessary, and safety-pins and q-tips. Imagine; of all the ways we could have lived, and we collectively decided to create a life-pattern that requires the use of socks. Pillow-cases, mascara, mouse-pads, all here in this realm because we ask them to be. Waiting. Potential energy and arbitration at once. Record.
Some of my work deals with the body-- occasionally as object, but just as often as the intangible absent thing, a self not present. The body as an absent presence through impression. While not there at all in form, body, the idea of it, remains. Pillows, pillowcases, now and then a weighty, intimate record of the human form. Of presence; of absence. Mandated, intimate carriers of the weight which we bring to them. The action goes unreciprocated.
I investigate the pieces of our lives that we keep, to mimic order, to quantify memory, and as records and markers of that which is intangible. Be it ritual, intimate spaces, or simply the things with which we find ourselves enamored— or at least unable to part, my work attempts to draw from body and object as records of rituals and spaces occupied unspoken, occasionally marginal, and absent. S.P