"Assorted objects and archaeolgical fragments from Edmund de Waal's childhood collection" In Magnificent obsessions: the artist as collector. Munich: Prestel, 2015.
Dispatches from the Library is a diary in words and images from my artist residency at the Bard Graduate Center Library in New York City. Bard Graduate Center is a graduate research institute which explores new ways of thinking about decorative arts, design history, and material culture.
“At the same time, once written down [as in an autobiography] memory becomes fixed and unchangeable. Mikhail Bahktin rightly observed that memory consists not only of itself but of each subsequent recollection of it. The memoir freezes the memory and cuts it off from those subsequent accretions. In addition, it does not so much represent the past as substitute it with an edited version of itself. It is both the representation of a life and an interpretation of it. As a text, the memoir is not mimetic but symbolic. Like a photograph, it replaces memory, a dynamic process of signification, with a fixed metonymical procession of signs, more or less carefully selected by the author for the specific purpose of revelation as a performance art.” (176)
Goldworthy, Vesna. "The Private Self: Interior and the Presenting of Memory." In Biography, Identity and the Modern Interior. Routledge, 2017.
Dispatches from the Library is a diary in words and images from my artist residency at the Bard Graduate Center Library in New York City. Bard Graduate Center is a graduate research institute which explores new ways of thinking about decorative arts, design history, and material culture.
"By nature memory is mortal, linked to the brain and the body that bears it, as well as notoriously unreliable and subject to revision; if we would hold onto memory we must find some way to preserve it. Memory is not static, but it can be made to seem so through the creation of forms of representation that attempt to solidify memories' meanings, and it is through this realm of preservation that memories interact with museums." (1)
“It is worth inquiring whether the memories associated through objects to form meaningful narratives do not in effect prevent other memories from being associated with individual objects, stifling the multiple possible meanings of any single object, perceived subjectively.” (4)
Crane, Susan A. Museums and memory. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000.
Dispatches from the Library is a diary in words and images from my artist residency at the Bard Graduate Center Library in New York City. Bard Graduate Center is a graduate research institute which explores new ways of thinking about decorative arts, design history, and material culture.
Siegel, Elizabeth, Patrizia Di Bello, Marta Rachel Weiss, and Miranda Hofelt. Playing with pictures: the art of Victorian photocollage. Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2009.
Godey's Lady's Book and Magazine (1854-1882); New York Vol. 89, Iss. 530, (Aug 1874)
Dispatches from the Library is a diary in words and images from my artist residency at the Bard Graduate Center Library in New York City. Bard Graduate Center is a graduate research institute which explores new ways of thinking about decorative arts, design history, and material culture.
“For many, the familiar presence of things is a comfort. Things are valued not only because of their rarity or cost or their historical aura, but because they seem to partake in our lives; they are domesticated, part of our routine and so of us. Their long association with us seems to make them custodians of our memories; so that sometimes, as in Proust, things reveal us to ourselves in profound and unexpected ways. Yet all this does not mean that things reveal themselves, only our investments in them. And those investments often carry with them a melancholy in the very heart of comfort...what we have here is a manifestation of Freud’s death drive: a moment of longing (one of many) for an anterior state of things, the state indeed of being a thing. For the death drive, as Freud postulates it, arose as a conservative resistance to the rise of consciousness in matter: 'In this way the first instinct came into being: the instinct to return to the inanimate state’ (Beyond the Pleasure Principle 38)" (3-4)
Schwenger, Peter. The Tears of Things: melancholy and physical objects. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.
Dispatches from the Library is a diary in words and images from my artist residency at the Bard Graduate Center Library in New York City. Bard Graduate Center is a graduate research institute which explores new ways of thinking about decorative arts, design history, and material culture.
images from artist Maria Thereza Alves's "Seeds of Change: New York, a Botany of Colonization." Elizabeth Rodini referenced these "ballast gardens" in her presentation "Active Objects: Rethinking Mobility, Geography, and the Museum."
Dispatches from the Library is a diary in words and images from my artist residency at the Bard Graduate Center Library in New York City. Bard Graduate Center is a graduate research institute which explores new ways of thinking about decorative arts, design history, and material culture.
Chanaux, Adolphe, and Jean-Michel Frank. Jean-Michel Frank. Paris: Editions du Regard, 1980.
Dispatches from the Library is a diary in words and images from my artist residency at the Bard Graduate Center Library in New York City. Bard Graduate Center is a graduate research institute which explores new ways of thinking about decorative arts, design history, and material culture.
Glass: history, manufacture and its universal application. Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company, 1923.
Dispatches from the Library is a diary in words and images from my artist residency at the Bard Graduate Center Library in New York City. Bard Graduate Center is a graduate research institute which explores new ways of thinking about decorative arts, design history, and material culture.