CONTACT
Contact is a series of resin castings of my hands in texting gestures.
Contact is a series of resin castings of my hands in texting gestures. Each hand points towards the viewer from a wall. A horizontal line of these hands extend across a wall. They are directed in orientation at the opposite wall, which contains the series, Thinking About My Mother, 9 images of a typewriter.
Each fingertip that would be texting is flattened against an invisible screen. The hands are imperfect and have immensely detailed skin, fingerprints, nails, and wrinkles. They are a strange off white non-human color.
The gestures we make while using our phones and devices look more like caresses from our angle but from the point of view of the screen, they are confronting, aggressive types of gestures. We make contact through screens, human touch is lost on a technological barrier between us and our communicant. I think about what it must look like to the screen, do we appear to be trapped in a small space while it can traverse the digital universe in microseconds? Does it consider it is free? How restricted it must think our physical body is.
As our world becomes faster and faster, we can in some ways become out of touch, in all meanings of the phrase. Physical interaction becomes awkward and embarrassing, thinking must be on the fly, without enough time to process meaning. Paradoxically while supermarket check-out people want to know what we are doing on the weekend and it irritates us that it is none of their business, we confess our deepest tragedies to unknown identities on the internet.
Public and private domains are blurred.
Our human fingerprints and faces are registered through and by the screen, identifying us digitally, logging us in to our private information, while harvesting that same information for other purposes. Privacy is a questionable concept under these circumstances. What actually remains private as we publicly sow images and information to the virtual and real world?
I think about the human value of touch, and that working by hand, producing artifacts born of touch as a process, involving time and slow contemplation. In working as physical artists we are registering our self into the work.