Objects
I have spent many hours of this project drawing objects in this collection. Without physically handling an artifact, I am probing details and relationships that a more passive stance would miss. I am searching for a view from which I can most effectively explore what I find most striking about it...
Graphite and shellac ink on mylar 2015-2017
Objects
I have spent many hours of this project drawing objects in this collection. Without physically handling an artifact, I am probing details and relationships that a more passive stance would miss. I am searching for a view from which I can most effectively explore what I find most striking about it, the curious detail, the narrative implied in its physical proximity to another object, its resemblance to objects elsewhere, the enigma of its presence here.
I am particularly attentive to the human presence at the other end of this process, the laborer who fashioned it, made present through traces of brush, tool, and hand on its surfaces. I am also absorbing its fragility, a thing wounded by the violence of history, defaced by natural disaster, reshaped through the normal course of physical decay. Each object testifies to unknowable acts that have fragmented, excised, and displaced it within a pool of artificially clear light inside a temperature controlled vitrine, framed by a carefully weighed explanatory text, redeployed among objects gathered from unimaginably different circumstances. Each object is further qualified, profoundly, by my utter inability to comprehend the ritual purposes, power relations, or quotidian circumstances for which it was originally intended.
Graphite and shellac ink on mylar 2015-2017
