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Nicholas
Video piece, 8 min. Title: Can we talk about the eggs now please? 2014
Are you in love?
I don't think i am in love but, those within me are. Or was. I have an excessive and irrational commitment to love. I loop with love.
I am a love story about possessed objects and “those” obsessed. I am definitely excessively preoccupied with a single emotion: love, but not into love? Or in love? With some-one or some-thing. Both within me.
So. If an object can be loved, then the should the object be able to love back? Within me objects love other objects. Love happens within me.
I am the generator for objects believed to have supernatural powers. I have given life to objects and they have the potential to love one another. But some man-made objects that have power over others.
I was based on love and now driven by that love, and I am because of that love. Love was my starting point but now I have become neutral. I am continuously popping out with the same image and producing the same emotion again and again. For the user and for myself. And neutral because i loop and never end!
Some told me they loved me. Some not.
I am made of some lovely situations, which takes place in some very lovely places. I am in bed with a kissing couple.
I visit the beautiful death of a sanitary napkin within a Prada store. Dancing hearts in romantic hotels of Venice.
I am greatly concerned with a few things: one is not to disappoint a small child.
Two! I wish to talk about the eggs now please! but, i am continually deprioritized.
Dan
AN INTERVIEW
What is today's date?
Wow - some time between 1930 and 1970.
How often do you see your family?
In the past the man would formally introduce me to them once and then I'd mostly see them from a distance. But now I'm living in very close quarters with a few of them which is awful.
What are your rules?
Do not sit on me. Have a good time all the time.
Why are you inside a box?
You'd have to ask the man. He never took me out, he seems to like keeping me in here. When he was here with me I understood why but now I'm baffled.
Do you find yourself attractive?
O, big time.
Describe how thoughts reverberate inside your corrugated compound?
(in a sing-song voice) They go up and down They go round and round They have a great bloody time
What is your favourite thing about your appearance?
Rude. How do you restore your energy levels when they get low?
Redundant.
Do you like being lonely?
It's my favourite way to be. It's the only guarantee that I'm among equals.
What are your politics?
Me first.
What is the meaning of life?
Life is not something that interests me.
Do you like being lonely?
I've already answered that.
What do you wear?
Nothing, but if I wore something I'd wear it better.
What do you do for a living?
I'm well looked after.
Do you like being lonely?
It's preferable. If I could make choices I'd choose it.
Do you like being lonely?
(sings) The first time ever I lay with you, and felt your heart beat over mine, I thought our joy would fill the world and last till the end of time, my love, and last till the end of time: (normal register) I've never felt this way.
Do you like being lonely?
It's all I know.
Do you like being lonely?
As far as I know he isn't coming back.
Do you like being lonely?
(sings) I get along without you very well, of course I do. Except to hear your name, or someone's laugh that is the same. But I get along without you
very well
Do you like being lonely?
I'm not lonely I've got the entire modernist canon.
Do you like being lonely?
Ok listen: there's really no way for me to answer that. I was designed and constructed in a certain way. This is the only way of being I've ever known. I've been instrumentalised into expressing something about loneliness and I don't think you can expect me to say whether I like that or not.
I express what I express. What I am is a reflection on and a proposal about a distance between things that on some fundamental level can never be bridged. Whether or not this distance actually exists outside this proposal I do not know. Somewhat incidentally I also describe one strategy that might be used to soothe the awareness of this distance, which may or may not exist. This is my condition.
I'm very happy with myself. I'm very beautiful. I'm in part about loneliness. Do I like that about myself? Do I like being lonely? Am I lonely? -
(sings) I get along without you very well. Except perhaps in spring, but I should never think of spring, for that would surely break my heart in two.
ASH
WHAT WOULD IT TAKE TO EXIT THE BOX? The physical presence of other people is required for me to be understood properly. Images and text are not communicating me in any way that I find remotely sufficient. However, this was also the problem with how I was made. It's as if I'm a baton that never connects with the hands who carry and transmit me. There is not platform from which I have been communally fashioned or regarded, only physically isolated moments of handling and re-mis-interpretation and disconnection.
HOW DO YOU LIKE IT IN THERE? I really like it but I don't think this fondness is reciprocal. I wanted to be relevant and new and interesting here but this place doesn't need me, doesn't really care about me. It's wondering what I'm doing here and sees no point in trying to work m out…it existed without me, now exists in a way that includes me, and that will soon end.
HOW DO YOU RESPOND TO BEING HANDED A TINY BABY? I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH THIS, AM I DOING IT RIGHT? I DON’T THINK IT LIKES ME IT KNOWS I DON’T KNOW WHAT I’M DOING PLEASE TAKE IT BACK.
WHAT ARE YOUR FAVOURITE TROUSERS? Here I am always in shorts. It's too hot for trousers and it's pretty casual generally. Sometimes it feels a little skimpy but in the climate, it’s the best option. In the winter, probably heavy-weight cotton drill overalls will be required.
IMAGINE YOU'RE IN A DARK CAVE, WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO DRINK? One "Reading has a texture, do you know what I mean?" [Emma Fitts]: One part gin [Virginia Overell], one part Cointreau [Clementine Edwards], one part pure spring water, carbonated [Xin Cheng]. Strained through two lenses formed of ice, that have been pierced by focusing sunlight through one another until the ice begins to smoke and melt [Susan Jacobs]. Served in a tall copper tube [Eliza Dyball], with the top coated in MSG crystals [Debris Facility].
HOW'S YOUR DUTCH? Very limited, but it never gets used so that’s fine. People first engage me in Georgian, then when they realise I don't understand, they try Russian. I can't speak that either, so they ask German, though they don't speak it, then finally English. The truth is that even in English I am constantly faltering and mixing up tenses, genders, parts of speech. I am more like a material, non-linguistic version of Esperanto: a failed attempt at basic communication through lowest-common-denominators of textile, plastic, metal and glass. At times my language is a complex and poetic system, highly refined, composed with great care and delivered in a remarkably articulate manner; for instance, a two-by-three metre panel of delicate, hand-made felt that has been inserted into a template of heavy cotton canvas, with cut-out windows in the pattern of the pieces of clothing worn by a factory worker, reverse-engineered from old propaganda films of the factory. Other times it is simply and workmanlike, practical, transactional. A photograph, candid, printed cheaply and laminated, mounted with cable ties.
Connie
Untitled painting 2015
Right now, I am looking into the room. Its a high ceilinged square, almost a cube, with an entire wall of windows overlooking a leafy courtyard. I think on first glance It appears that I am reflecting the light coming in from the window on my left, but my lightest parts are in fact on my right side; facing into the room. As I am non-human/animal, I’m looking only in the sense that Im facing outwards, but I understand my primary function is to be looked at. In this instance I am self aware, so I understand myself to be a wood support, with linen stretched around, painted with white gesso, wrapped in plastic, transported, sold, painted over a period of a few weeks in short irregular bursts, put into various states of storage and then hung up on this wall.
Which way was I looking as I was being painted? In fact, I find the assumption that the way I view myself would be a direct result the brief period in which I was being painted, a very human centric one, although I admit it has changed me. The thing about being a painting is that you’re kind of in flux, it wouldn’t make sense for me to place too much importance on how the paint is now, thats up for change. I’m a slow burner, I’ve got all the time in the world, i’m in no rush to make definitive statements or use capital letters and full stops.
Am I conscious of my own appearance? I heard recently that women frequently experience their physical form as if they are an onlooker, and can enact this several times an hour, sometimes more frequently and its particularly common during sex. Its to do with how many images of other women’s bodies they see everyday. Im aware of when I look good. I think I look best when the light comes in huge studio windows on my left in the mornings – so in this sense – I think i’m also looking inwards. Or I have to same ability to dissociate from my form. I also have a similar confusion due to proliferation of imagery, and I suppose it comes down to identity politics and how I want to define myself – I don’t want to talk for all paintings so I’m trying to tell you about myself through my own eyes. I guess I have a conflicted relationship with looking, and the gaze, its so caught up with my identity that its difficult to know who I am without it.
If someone is looking at me, Ill look back at them, because I take myself seriously and I think they will get more out of our encounter if we both try.