Objects are us

Sculpture by Mark Cypher

These art works suggest that when objects become externalised (as in the process of generating and building art works) they have a kind of agency of their own. These intimate associations can expose the internal and external feedback loops at work between objects and subjects, whether they be private and public, past and present, dead or alive.

The grafting of my face upon the mythological body of the gnome began as an attempt to expose how identity is constantly influenced if not colonized, by the ground we inhabit. In part, the gnome is a metaphor for second nature. That is, a version of 'nature' that is urban, cleansed in some sense, yet by no means benign. But its in the process of remaking of all things 'natural', that there is a sense that we are also remade in the process? On the one hand this action represents a desire to connect or identify with the aims of such objects yet simultaneously underlines the struggle to clearly define where it ends and I begin.

The representation of the subject as inanimate could also be is a desire to inhabit a certain space. Similarly, Goss discusses Heinrich von Kleist's story 'On the Marionette Theatre' as a demonstration of a statue's ability to impose upon a person. The story begins with a young man drying himself in a public bath. He catches sight of himself in a mirror in which he inadvertently assumes the pose of the famous German statue Spinario, which depicts a boy pulling a thorn from his foot. The boy remarks to his friends about the resemblance and begins to become obsessed with this image. At this point the boy begins to find himself compulsively copying the statue's pose, becoming ever more ridiculous with each attempt. After standing in front of the mirror for days, the unself-conscious becomes trapped, and 'like an iron net, an invisible and incomprehensible power enveloping the free play of gestures'. in the end the boy becomes the statue's double. The desire of identification is so strong that the boy allows himself to be moved by a force outside of himself. Dispossessed, and depersonalised by an assimilation into the statues space the boy represents the symptoms of psychasthenia and mimicry.

Similarly, Caillois interprets a loss of personality to space as psychasthenia. As Caillois suggests, "Space pursues them, encircles them, digest them in a gigantic phagocytosis. It ends by replacing them". In this way, the body separates itself from thought, the individual breaks the boundaries of her skin and therefore occupies the other side of her senses . The inherent possibilities of extending the boundaries of self may mean merging to the point of a 'reduced mode of existence' toward the eventual assimilation into the environment. Not in order to colonise a space but to better understand a certain position by collapsing the distances between subject and object.

The relationship that these works suggest is not just a one way anthropomorphism on behalf of the artist. Rather once externalised these objects grow into an agency and space of their own, resplendent with additional hybrid properties.