On Twitter (@VirtualEyeArt) participants selected and shared photographed sets of objects, with which to describe themselves. They produced four sets on different themes: work, interests, home and family. They commented on how the selection was also an exploration of themselves; a process of self-curation and a consideration of a particular object’s ability to communicate.
While I engage with the process, through the text elements of the Twitter conversation and my broader knowledge of the individuals; artistically I respond to the images as a “vocabulary of objects”. I take their self-curated “vocabulary of objects” and overlay my curation, isolating elements of the photographs, selecting placement and prominence, and curating the story I want to tell while retaining an essential honesty to my understanding of who the people are.
In Western culture, we read left to right, top to bottom, often resolving itself as a clockwise scan of an image. My collages can be read this way, although this is not a conscious approach and perhaps is driven by a wish to tell stories. What is conscious is a need to keep the eye moving, there is not a final image (like the last word on a page) each element of visual vocabulary is part of an interconnected network revising and recasting the meaning of the whole in their interactions.
An important part of this project’s process is the exploration of shared context, the degree to which these objects engender a similar response, form a shared language, a recognisable vocabulary. How confident can we feel that we respond to a given object in a similar manner to others, and whether we like it or not any object seen connected to us communicates something about us?
