Objects and Images

I thought Krista’s recent installation was a fascinating exploration of objects and representation. Krista’s manipulating both the object (coffee cups), and their photographic image brought up so many interesting questions about the relationship between the image and the object.

One of the things that interested me most was the manipulation/destruction of the images themselves, presented next to the other “physical” representation. What does the destruction of the image-as-object achieve? For me, I think it foregrounds the photographic image as an object separate from the cup—and I thought that the destruction that carried over from the photograph to the frame (in the instance in which it did) was very interesting as well. Within many contexts, the frame of an image is basically supposed to be ignored in our reading, and our reading of the image is supposed to be limited to what is represented— ie, the image is not an object within the gallery space. Manipulating the frame itself was a very interesting component to this piece, and for me would have made the piece an “installation” even if the cups had not been present, or if the images were hanging on a wall, because it gives me the sense that we are not merely looking at images, but objects that have been transported from another space. Moreover—there’s a really neat tension between what is “real”: is one object more true than the other?

For this reason, I think it’s unimportant to me whether the object in the frame is an actual representation of the object next to it, or not. But I do like placing the two objects side by side, as this is a natural sort of reading—and this context plays on our reading of events, and how we read referents, whether they are words, or whether they are images that index an event. I think is very effective in terms of working with memory.

Something else that we talked about in class was: how do we read these specific objects, a rather undecorated coffee cup and a very domestic- looking picture frame? For me, it is impossible to view these objects without a sense of the mundane, the every day. These objects for me are private and domestic—and made more so by their re-contextualization within a public space. This displacement of the everyday also feels like a really interesting strategy to use in contemplating how memory works.