little narratives, in discontinuity but also autonomous integrity
little narratives, in discontinuity but also autonomous integrity, is taken from the response of a professor regarding work I made for an assignment in an art history class. This excerpt resonated for me and was one I found myself returning to as I developed this body of work. This same professor also suggested I read Francis Ponge, a “poet of things,” which incidentally started my inquiry into the everyday.
My thinking and making began with using everyday ephemera, found or in my possession as physical objects or photographs depicting a thing, person, or place, and with these creating little stories. What reading Ponge taught me is that the things we surround ourselves with, and share our existence with are often taken for granted yet inform how we see the world; they speak to us in a language that taps an inner part of ourselves and are also a universal language shared by others. How images conjure words or feelings also works in reverse - words conjure images or feelings – how connections are made with artwork or writing speaks to this. And when fabricating an object, how materials and context play a part in communicating. In my own way, I am addressing nostalgic memory, longing, and beauty. It is intentional that the images and words are disparate, ambiguous to each other, hence in discontinuity but also autonomous integrity, I want to allow room for the viewer to make their own connections.
Video, photographs, objects, and fabricated forms are some of the materials that constitute these expressions. The work is intended as an experience that invites viewers to observe the most intimate of gestures: the poetic word, a found/private snapshot, the possessions of a person, the traces of fingers or the grip of a hand in clay or papier-mâché, and the possibilities of connections between them.
Each was made in response to the others, one after the other. Ideally, they would exist in a single space, I guess in this strange time of not being able to go to a gallery or someone’s studio to see the work in person, try to imagine.