response to Krista

                                                                    RESPONSE TO KRISTA  

First if all, I would say good work, good job. It is nice to see subtle, personal but universal work, that is silent but open in its appeal the emotive, transitive, if not transcendental aspects of existence. There was a lot of conversation about certain theoretical issues concerned with the ontological relationship between the tea cup as a thing-in-itself and the somewhat cul-de-sac like debate concerning how the thing-itself relates to its photographic representation and how each form represents a different but unique relationship to the other. You managed to present a marriage of sorts between the teacup itself and it’s nearest duplicitous relative, the Photograph. Though the teacup and the photograph are both in themselves inherently self-representative, their self-representations are seen as occurring on anomalous and differing ontological levels, which may be true, the photograph of the teacup is not the teacup itself, but simultaneously it is not not the teacup any more than a memory of my grandmother is somehow innately not connected to my actual grandmother or that a bird is innately different from its birdness.  It is this amorphous tight rope of tenuous connectivity that you seem to have crossed with a delicate and lightness of touch. You quietly threw a life line to the much maligned imperfection and much suspected relativity of photographic depiction and anchored it not only in a two way relationship between the concrete physicality of the object itself and the photographic depiction itself, but in doing so you stretched the obvious binary relationship of object-photograph relationship to a further humanized tripartite relationship that binds the teacup and the photograph of the teacup to an inescapable linkage with a third element of emotional-spiritual embodiment.  Here the simple marriage of harmonizing dualities takes a supple shift away from the mere physicality of representation and opens up a serene subjectivity of contemplation and embodied complexities that are not available through the mere physical / representation itself.

 I think part of what helps the piece to succeed is the way the teacup itself functions as non-utilitarian object. It is simple thingness. It is not, so to speak, a teacup to be drunk from, it is not a teacup to be cleared from a cluttered morning table, nor is it a teacup that has any use value other than in its delicately sensuousness and minimally decorated form. It sheds its culturally induced usefulness and returns to something more primal and non-technological, it transforms into something of a talismanic mirror or a semiotic actor concerned with the unyielding dialectic of permanence and change. Transience. Memory. Mortality. As I thought about the cups pairings with their photographic “Equivalents” I began to think that they were not just three discrete pairings making three discrete and perhaps separate iterations, but they could be observed as a sequential and allegorically relational, not only to your intent of memory, but they could also point to differentiated phases of life.  In the first pairing the cup as well as its photographic representation is clean, undisturbed and intact, an undisturbed reflection of unblemished youth. The second pairing of the broken cup with its photographic representation in an equally broken frame could be read as the pain and crisis that inevitably comes with time. In the third pairing the cup is again in one piece, even if the cup and the frame are soiled and in less than perfect cosmetic youthful form the cup has returned to a state of inexplicable wholeness.  This third section speaks of old age. Soiled, and having overcome earlier trials there is a return to wholeness. An imperfect, and impermanent state, that can still be a perfection as long as perspective glances at it with an acute and compassion enough eye.  

I hope that you work further with the motifs of silence and memory and let us not forget simplicity.