Corpora DelictiCorpora Delicti is the first project of my emerging studio practice. In this series I attempt to take a curious polyvalent stance on the verb “curate”. During 2012-2013 I collected paintings, posters, photographs, drawings and decorative objects that I found in thrift stores, yard sales or in the dumpster. These artifacts had been discarded and are considered by most inadequate, ailing, or failed-art. I intervened these pieces in various ways, always leaving a part or memory of the failed-art attempt behind. My purpose was to instill a notion of “curing” or healing that is closer to the original meaning of the Latin term curare, which means to treat or cure or to look after. Another way of looking at this is that I cannibalized or recycled these artifacts into my own art works. I presume to “cure” them by giving them a new meaning guided by my own instinct. I am not particularly interested in the found objects to connect to a specific past or aesthetic, but in what made these attempts fail, and what failures can trigger by activating a creative space. It is the failed look and feel of these corpses ‐corpora delicti- that initiate a drive to a new significance. The layers of pre-existing information are often dense, and I cover or veil them with opaque layers over and over. These operations of concealment are deeply rooted in my personal experiences as a dual agent in many fronts. The interventions may be aggressive, related to accident, and certainly irreversible. It is the proximity to decay and imminent destruction that marks this creative process from the start. The recovery of objects and cultural artifacts that have fallen into disuse has revolutionary potential. These artifacts somehow carry the aura normally attached to the products of the modern and late capitalism worlds as something faded. Walter Benjamin argues that an awareness of this decay is the precondition for a critical relationship to the present. References: Rosalind Krauss, “Corpus Delicti”, October, Vol. 33 (Summer, 1985), pp.31-72. Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 2, ed. Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p.13.
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