This work is an effort to think about the transience of human life through a material language. The footprints are made of sugar and are extremely fragile. A summer breeze, a light rain, or even picnic ants present a threat. Intact, the unmistakably human prints present a residue of a presence. Over time, the prints disappear and are absorbed completely into the environment.
This work is also partly a response to what I see as the impossibility of disappearance in digitally mediated society. The electronic traces we leave behind at every point of interaction with the outside world are collected, analyzed, bought and sold. These traces survive us in databases of every sort. I am contrasting the thought of a digital eternity with an object of organic impermanence.
Found art, more commonly known as the readymade, derives significance from the designation placed upon it by the artist. This epistemological license is analogous to the practice of divination in that a subject is acting as interpreter of otherwise insignificant phenomena or material. When explicating a sign the soothsayer proclaims it a communiqué from the Divine. By exalting the object to the status of art, the artist declares it a vessel for Sublime meaning. Both are delivered through the labors of their professors. The acts are commensurate. Is it that the artist, like the shaman, aspires to touch upon the robes of God? What threshold do these objects of human creativity purport to cross? What lies beyond if not other products of imagination: faith, myth, and hope.
When I was a kid, I mean little, like 4 or something, my mother used to tell me that if I behaved she would give me the telephone number of the Virgin Mary. All I had to do was sit quietly and wait. I waited for a long time. The hope tamed the impetuous me. I was sure that she had a phone and thought that it must look just like this one. The world has so much faith in technology. I can’t help but wonder what that is all about.