On long runs through Oakland I think about how I interpret the world through the objects I encounter daily. Most specifically, the intimate relationships we create with objects and the behavioral cues embedded in them. I document them, outside, in the cityscape now useless and unhoused on the street. Imagining the intimacy that we once had with them as they performed their function for us. I was left wondering about them, as tiny perfect sculptures. What happens to an object’s identity when it no longer supports us? When we no longer find them valuable?
We rely on a one-way intimacy with them, having daily physical contact. What happens when these objects become unstable or threatening? what happens when they become frail and useless? Can they remind us that we are both physically and socially vulnerable? When we shift our understanding of utilitarian objects can it shine a light on the shifting boundaries between personal and social space? Public and private relationships? Are these futile barriers? The useless and the useful are closer than they appear.
I take my notes as I run. I document with photos, picking up items left behind. Taking them home and assigning new roles as well as a new purpose for them. My “sketches” become and give body to my final work. I use their original form to create molds and recreate them in a bourgeoisie material. Glass, a material once meant only for the wealthy as an opulent commodity. In this medium, I can re-examine what role context plays in an object's perceived value.
A hybrid of utilitarian objects, a mask, a pair of underwear slung over soap exhibited on top of marble. The sculptures can be taken individually, or together as a whole complete piece. Each piece references an item of mass-produced decor or an urban landscape artifact, Observed, documented, and reclaimed from the street. Deconstructing both the decor and the physical objects that inhabit a space pushes them to become more and more of an accumulation of moments or thoughts, as opposed to a literal mattress, sheet, rag, or mask.
Duchamp said, “Choosing an object itself is a creative act, canceling out the useful function of the object makes it art and Its presentation in the gallery gives it a new meaning.”
These simple objects can help us examine our relationship with a post-industrial digital world and machine fabricated mass-production. These mass-produced unhoused objects, re maid, and given a second life examines how effective ugliness has the power to subvert, and, as such, is often the territory of the radical, it has the power to transform, shift opinion, and to shape taste.