Past Present Perfect
Past Present Perfect is a part of speech based on an imagined future and invented to accompany this exhibition. Thinking of the gallery of as a museum of the not-yet-happened, the works on display are investigations or encounters with fragments of dishware based on a future when we have forgotten what to do with them. The works grapple with Otto Neurath’s notion of a universal language and the development of the “isotype” (a system of silhouettes like the images of man and woman on most bathrooms doors). In this instance, rather than exemplify the commonality recognizable in objects, it problematizes the familiar and offers a new and different view.
Denied context, the raw materials of a dinner party (dishes, conversation, the performance of the objects) are rematerialized or reconstituted in different formats. These works have a curious, and at times, a poetic distance from their source.
Table Setting for Eight – Graphite captures the migrations of soup bowls, salad plates, dinner plates, and dessert bowls throughout the course of a dinner party. The drawing is the trace of these actions.
Laugh – Groups of parentheses are captured in beeswax. On closer look, the parentheses are slices of plates turned on their edges, giving a new perspective to the round forms we are so accustomed to using. Representing sound waves, these encaustics mimic a snippet of conversation from a dinner party.
Depth – The taught forms of just-barely vacuum-formed housewares accentuates the silhouettes of the lip of a bowl, a cup, a plate. These forms are abstracted to heighten the familiarity of the shape and dimension while interrupting and employing the technology of production.
Edge – A wall of circles and lines looks a bit like cuneiform in 3D. The objects are highly modeled with visible finger marks. Creating a series of delicate clay skeletons, each of these sculptures is a vivisection or edge of a dish.
Table – 400 potatoes light 100 diodes illuminating a cyanotype of a sliver of tea cup. Making bioplastic from the harvested potato starch led to Long Chain Polymer.
