A chorus of things crooning:
“Look! Look!”
The bio-mechanical apparatus of the eye shudders, clicks, whirrs, and Psyche responds:
“I know not where to lay my head.”
In “Tells,” Marisa Kriangwiwat Holmes approaches the idea of the photograph not as pure image but rather as circuit, treating the photograph—both object and permeable category—with a deflectionary logic where the operative verbs at play become: substitute, shift, transpose, and link.
Matboard is both surface and cartography. In a domestic setting in which images are “top mounted” we encounter a web of familial landmarks—diplomas, family photos, certificates etc. (the contouring of a social world). In a passe-partout the matboard eclipses the image, both protecting it from the glass of the enclosure and functioning as a framing device specifying where we should hone our attention (depth as a means of elevating subject matter). In some instances (here) it sits in Limbo—all spotlight and veil. The frame always sings louder than its subject!
This future of mine promised novelty; a series of brand new instant-nows, everlasting.
As glossy as things get, as virtual as the image becomes, I cannot help but to think everything is already a palimpsest. The imperfection of a screenshot marked by a phone’s UI feels more or less as intimate as the fuckups in the handwritten postcard.
I get the sense that no quantity of sheen can change the fact that the act of selection is the act of being a town flirt. The Love Lock (a metal padlock affixed to a fence or bridge as a talisman protecting a couple’s everlasting love) gained popularity only in the early aughts but flaking paint, detritus, and ruin suggest something beyond itself—a (metaphysical) idea, a (primordial) quality, an (absent) figure.
Michel Seuphor wrote: “There must be a painting totally free of dependence on the figureor object-which, like music, illustrates nothing, tells no story, and launches no myth. Such a painting would simply evoke the incommunicable kingdoms of the spirit, where dreams become thought, where line becomes existence.”
Here we go again with the primacy of structure over sign.
In a coin toss, justice is not meted out by a cold and distant God but the warmth of the flipping hand.
—Leo Cocar
at april april, Pittsburgh
until February 8, 2025
Source link
