Untitled

Installation

2024

26 x 48 x 50 inches

Conceptual artworks often utilize mirrors as symbolic representations of the viewer's connection to the work. The audience becomes one with the artwork. With the use of the mirrors at the bottom of each box, I attempt to capture the essence of a person. I reject representing a person whether abstracted or realistic since I don’t believe I fully know how to depict the essence of a person—evidenced through how the boxes are empty. From this, I reasoned the best way to evoke the essence of a person is through reflection. All that is contained within the box is the reflection of a person when they peer into it— we see people only through reflection, and not the reality of their essence. We are not really seeing their essence, but that is the best I can do to capture it, even though I am not. That’s why the box is empty.

With these two objects posed against each other, it evokes a tension (given the previous establishment that the boxes represent people). And the boxes serve to perpetuate the idea of “keeping people in a box.” A body is that which contains us. The box contains our essence. The point of these two boxes , in their transparency and position toward one another, is to highlight the barriers that lie between them.

I have found this idea compelling that while seeing one another, there is a touch out of our reach which surpasses notions of physically—that although we have an intuition of physical interaction, there persists the barrier between minds. (My mind is my own box.) One must understand this artwork within the western philosophical tradition of thinking of oneself as a closed off individual and independent of other entities: a mentality similar to thinking of oneself as box bounded. It connects back to the idea of Descartes, how I can only really prove that I exist.

Roses - the platonic forms. Within this installation, having established the boxes as two people, outside of those essences, what would exist is the world of forms—a realm postulated by Plato which is also beyond our grasp.

This art work centers around playing with the joke I have created. Through engaging in criticism of conceptual art, I become what I criticize. My description is intended to sound esoteric and vaguely “intellectual,” hinging on jargon to sound more meaningful than it is. That’s my whole point. It seems anything can be added to describe a conceptual artwork regardless of logistical incongruity.