Plastic, some paper and a bit of chemistry...

For the exhibition of 'five' at PCP I wrote an essay titled 'Nothing to see here....'. In it I talked about the inability of people to disconnect content from form, especially when portraiture (ie. friends or family) is involved... Imagine burning a family photo. This lack of disconnect is exploited by ambiguous images that play with personal reference points. As an example, consider an image of a particular style of chair and how that might, for some, be associated with a lost relative or other personal moment in their own history.

Over the last few days I've been cleaning out various sections of my archive and disposing of proof sheets as well as test prints, etc. The source material is still whole so that which is in the bin is merely non-unique process objects. What I found interesting was the significant twinge I had when it came to getting rid of any image that was mildly personally. It almost feels disrespectful and I'm still tempted to sort them out from the rubbish.

I feel queasy for both their disposal but equally with the thought that I don't have the disconnect I thought I had.