The alchemical term caput mortuum refers to refuse matter that has been stripped of its worldly function. The exhibition handles this idea with found objects that are withdrawn from utility — bones, moldy bread, crumpled foil, trash or roadside ruins. The objects can be interpreted as melancholic, inherently inaccessible and self-referential.
The reflective space of the metallic ground acts as a neutral decontextualized field. Each object is singularly condensed into an epidermal surface of its image. Paint is considered here as a surface built to contain itself, coagulating matter into the illusion of stillness. The paintings suggest mimetic replication but they are not accurately reproduced. They approximate self-reflexivity as a symptom and a method of melancholic introversion, as if the object is imitating itself, its image falling away or castrated from its corporeal form.
“No longer a phantasm and not yet a sign, the unreal object of melancholy introjection opens a space that is neither the hallucinated oneiric scene of the phantasms nor the indifferent world of natural objects.” Agamben, Giorgio. Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. 25.
“The alchemical or artistic work is strangely inside, and the human mind that directs it is also partly its inert substrate. What was once the agent of conceptual control over the work has become the bricks of its furnace… The furnace produces a product that is the furnace, and the mind tries to watch a process that is the mind.” Elkins, James. What Painting Is. New York: Routledge, 2000. 166.
