Shadows of Things We Wished
We Had
2019, Chicago, IL
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For: Volume Gallery
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Team: Jimenez Lai, Dee Vasilevskaia, Mark Kamish, Kyoung Eun Park, Jake Parkin, David Musa, Jiajia Shi, Michael DePrez, Renee Gao, Ilayda Kal.
The still life is a typology of fictional paintings that carries a history of curatorial practices where the representation of the self is made public.
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In a still life painting, a collection of inanimate objects would be arranged in a three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional plane, and through such a process the identity of individuals can be symbolically communicated by the staging of objects. For example, owning a freshly captured salt-water fish and a newly sliced citrus can be a powerful message about the status of the luxury of a person residing in inland Bavaria. The distantly caught fish and the exotic citrus may or may not have co-existed within the same time and space, but the canvas becomes a fictional space that unites the idea of the fish together with the idea of the fruit. By juxtaposing improbable objects together, an otherwise impossible narrative about a subject is constructed.

As we arrive at the second decade of the 21st Century, our relationship with the "public self" within a private collection has evolved alongside the rise of social media. The living room, once a private environment for intimate social gatherings, is now changing in its nature. Programmatically, the living room is becoming a room that stages gathered objects rather than a space to socialize in. The living room is almost transforming from a three-dimensional space into a two-dimensional image - akin to its still-life painting origins, the collection of nicknacks in the living room function more as a storytelling device than a room full of functional objects. In a lot of ways, how we handle our stories on social media has redefined the idea of a living room into a new medium that socializes on the human's behalf.






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Shadows of Things We Wished We Had (2019) is a still life painting. This exhibition features a collection of designed-objects by Bureau Spectacular. Rhymes along the various curves, figures, and colors, there is a non-linear conversation between the objects in this living room. Some of the objects are but mere shadows, as they do not coexist in the same time and space as this three-dimensional still life painting.


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To Objects
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