Subversive and craft-y, their ‘by hand’ quality displaces them from the private space of the domestic into a space of alterity in the hopes of drawing the viewer’s attention to the ways one can be influenced by habituated expectations of the objects featured here, and to the mechanics of such representation.
Objects are the facts of us. Looking through objects – an exercise in discharging them from what one believes they convey, or how they ought to function – forces them to reveal what they do. A book that disturbs and makes one wish it had not been read; a lumpy mattress that leaves the frazzled sleeper miserable in the morning; food poisoning: these encounters with thingness are instantiations of an experience with objects, whose purpose has been checked and thwarted by something that provokes the unexpected.
Objects are concrete, opaque, full of purpose. That is, until their essence or thingness checks its function. Things can be resolvable or remain a source of speculation. In a sense, then, ideas are projected onto the object, but an encounter with things is an event. What makes an object intolerable is that it is a thing and not a thing, simultaneously an object deprived of purpose, indefinable, but still there, exposing an underbelly where forms and words lose clarity and delight in contradictions.
