A Moveable Feast – Part II - Exhibitions

The second installment of A Movable Feast is dedicated to the work of New York based artist Sean Paul.

A still life assembled from domestic products (cup, bowl, saucer, and plate) is marked with black squares of tape; the black squares function as tokens, which allow the spatial geometry of the still life to be discerned. Following standard practices of technical representation, used for example in the fields of architecture or product design, the still life is pictured from six perpendicular planes forming a box of views composed of the front, back, left, right, top and bottom angles. This box is unfolded and then refolded forming four composites of one, two, four, and six views into a single plane. This plane then becomes the array, which informs the material images’ unfolding into lived space, or a domestic scene.

The traditional nature morte, including memento mori tableau, relies upon the animate, positive concept of nature or life to negatively define itself (life moves, death is static). In opposition to this positive concept of life, these works take their definition and logic from the prolonged movement of death found in commercial advertising, and the systematic combinatory configurations presented to the consumer. What is posited is not that there is still life, but that there is an animate death, a much more lucrative field, in the loss of the object and the investment in its absence.

A detail of a towel’s surface structure is incorporated into another planar structure that includes color, resolution, and gradation guides. Sharpness, broken into two fundamental factors: resolution and acutance, is one category of technical qualification used to discern a digital image’s quality. Resolution has become an ubiquitous concern for anyone operating in the fields of image reproduction. One could argue that Resolution has established itself as a primary category because it is capable of buttressing a kind of social promise of spatial engagement. In other words, if the technologically advanced sectors of the world appear to have passed beyond a state of one-dimensionality, it may be due to the fact that the technological veil has simply gained in resolution (i.e. detail).