Temporary Comfort
2018, Pigment Ink on Paper
Temporary Comfort is composed of dead flowers in a clear glass vase, a plate of cookies on a lace doily, and a pile of wax sheets melting off the edge of an old side table. An image of a white sofa is projected onto the table in the corner of the room. I preserved the cookies by dehydrating and sealing them with an acrylic medium. The first is a madeleine, and speaks to the idea of involuntary memory discussed in Marcel Proust’s, In Search of Lost Time. Proust tells the story of how eating a madeleine transported him back to Sunday mornings with his aunt before church. The sensory experience of eating the cookie triggered this spontaneous reminiscence. The second cookie in the photograph is a Hostess Apple Pie, and brings back my own memories of youth and shopping at a local Hostess Outlet while living in Texas.
The wax prints used in Temporary Comfort were created from my earlier installation created in 2017 titled, Shadows of Time. In that work, etchings were made into plexiglass using biographical pictures from my own life. I poured beeswax over the etchings, let it dry, and removed the plexiglass. The resulting image is barely visible depending on how the light bounce off the print. The wax material references Plato’s tablet, where he theorizes that memory is analogous to a wax tablet into which our perceptions and thoughts stamp images of themselves, as a signet ring stamps impressions in wax. I often repurpose the imagery and materiality from my own work so the components accumulate a past of their own.