The human-object relationship has been studied and analyzed for centuries from religious, philosophical, sociological, and scientific perspectives due to its mysterious impact on the human psyche. When considered, we notice that objects inhabit our everyday lives from infancy until late in adulthood, attaching to our sense of identity and understanding of the world around us We desire them, fear them, forget them, touch them, and destroy them. In many ways, humans need objects and objects need humans in order to make sense of each other. As a result of capitalist consumer culture, the dialogue between human and object is obscured. Karl Marx’s view on the fetishism of commodities articulates how the history of an object is made to be invisible through its alienated method of production and distribution. Factors that contribute to the overall composition of an object in a space, such as an understanding of the limitations of its materiality, are overlooked. What is left is an aesthetically evocative object defined by the fragile significance of its imposed functionality. However, in Bill Brown’s essay on Thing Theory, he states that when an object is broken or otherwise stripped of this functionality as a commodity item it is reverted to a perceived lacking state devoid of social value. The object is placed in an almost purgatory existence where it can be both something and nothing yet still hold space through the makeup of its autonomy. Brown calls this unknown state “Thingness” and it is of great interest to me.
My artwork uses a process-oriented approach that challenges the consumerist viewer to reevaluate their relationship to objects by confronting the vulnerable state between “object” and “thing” through its materiality and form as it relates to identity. I am most interested in creating work that evolves overtime. I do not believe in a finished piece of artwork. I believe in exhaustion in which an object’s desire to concrete its identity as an object fortuitously pushes itself towards the domain of non-representational Thingness. This is often by contrasting the quality of said object’s materiality and manipulating form through abstraction. I am inspired by the Surrealist, Fluxus, and Modernist movement as they embrace ambiguity as truth and my artistic influences are performance artists, sculptors, and other interdisciplinary artists such as Yoko Ono, Erwin Wurm, and Marisol Escobar.