I just want to sit. Sit and stare at objects.
Why the allure of the object? This thing, full of volume, inert, just sitting. I’m not sure, but it has an entrancing pull that reverberates out, it touches me. I guess I’m drawn to the magic in these objects. I can’t quite fully know them, I think I maybe don’t want to know. But yet a specter of their being insists on being seen and felt. So here I am. In love with objects, arranging them, thinking about them and what they mean and how they exist in the world. I think about their different essences, their different modes of presence, their different forms of being-a contour, a color, a drape, a shadow, a hue, a whiff, a smudge, a delight, a fringe, a depth, a ding, a scratch, an oblongness, a wisp, a volume, a spirit. All these parts, or all these versions of presence, they’re here. They seem to delight in conversations with other objects, with me. They reverberate and space-out, and fade and delay and hiss and create a rhythm—an expanding echo.
Sit with the idea of an object and it will linger. Let it in and it will metamorphise into some strange organic abstraction. Hold it long enough and it will grow, certainly it will remain, and it will change—a fazing in and out of spacetime that all things do. Still lifes are just like that. Seen from a certain vantage point all still lifes are a little entropic. They present as a banal stability but their shadow is the continuously changing perceptual relationship with spacetime. If you tune in, they’re a deep dizzying dazzling psychedelic well of ethereal human connection to being.
A still life is a lens of perception—a brief snapshot of objects in aesthetic repose.
The more I stare at these objects, the more I see objects relating to other objects, and objects relating to their world. The more I get wrapped up in the still life and how this simple presentation of objects is a conversation full of deep esoteric meaning out of reach. I can’t quite figure it out, but it’s there, this seemingly unending depth right here—shrouded in banality of being. But that’s it too, it’s the banality that makes them beautifully haunting. That’s the echo again, ever expanding. The more layers peeled back the deeper they go, the more I feel the relationships of objects before me are actually alive—a never-ending conversation—changing as it morphs, a continual happening. It must be one of those instances of too much information that the limits of our human brain can’t fully perceive. We just have to tune in even deeper and find ourselves at an even spacier depth to contact what is happening there, here, now. It must be like magic, but it’s there.
This is a love letter to the more banal, innocuous, simpler things that exist all around. The splendor of this world is wild if we take the time, have a look, and sit with it.
