Carl Marin
Home Remedies
Carl Louie, Toronto, 2019
“Loving one’s home is not about being fixed into a place, but rather it is about becoming part of a space where one has expanded one’s body, saturating the space with bodily matter: home as overflowing and flowingover”[1]
- Sara Ahmed
In his installation Home Remedies, Carl Marin captures the rhythm of things that gather on porches, kitchen tables, and backyards in the lived suburban space surrounding his mother’s home in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. Digitally manipulated anaglyph photographs mounted on IKEA countertop and shelf structures depict oscillating compositions that register the precarity of ordinary sensibilities — A Happy Birthday plate, faux china, a big jar of pennies, semi-deflated basketballs, white plastic chairs, garden bench, cement birdbath, backyard tree and soggy firewood.
The strange is made familiar by objects that extend our bodies in ways that make us feel at home.3The heaps of stuff we live with cohere into a moving assemblage that structures the sets through which one lives a life.The IKEA shelf, made of composite material and laminate, allows us to inhabit space-as-home, yet it could just as easily find itself in the backyard by the shed, warped and bloated. Things that pile up endure, but they sag over time. Shifting affects and attachments propel the circulation of objects in and around domestic sites establishing their use and emotional value in the present. [2]
A home is furnished by objects that have a certain place. We reach without hesitation with implicit knowledge about where things are. Losing things “…for this reason, can lead to moments of existential crisis: we expect to find ‘‘it’’ there, as an expectation that directs an action, and if ‘‘it’’ is not there, we might even worry that we are losing our minds along with our possessions.”[3]Objects that are ready-to-hand extend and ground our bodies in space. Yet, space is full of disruption and impediments and objects decay and de-form.
In the gallery, asymmetrical red and blue transparent screens, mediate our experience of each image. In Willow Blue, the broken edge of a white and blue rose patterned china plate is mended in one filter and the table is tidied through another. Object assemblages, shift between ontological states of disrepair and remedy, appearance and disappearance, liveness and exhaustion, never stabilizing or becoming situated in either. The anaglyph photograph points away from representation to the phenomenological experience of perception. We lose one perspective and are introduced to another, a process that happens again and again. But the ‘‘loss’’ itself is not empty or waiting; it is an object, thick with presence.
-Catherine Telford Keogh, 2018
[1]Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others(London: Duke University Press, 2006), 11.
[2]Lauren Berlant has described our attachment to objects as a cluster of promises that hold out a glimmer of the unachievable good lifedefined by upward mobility, job security, political and social equality, and durable intimacy. These attachments are “knotty tethering to objects, scenes and modes of life.” This tetheringsuggests an affective relationship in which bodies, things and space are pulled together in ways that produce and reproduce habits, beliefs and orientations. Berlant describes “‘cruel optimism’ as a relation of attachment to compromised conditions of possibility whose realization is discovered either to be impossible, sheer fantasy, or too possible, and toxic” Lauren Berlant,Cruel Optimism, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 24
[3]Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others(London: Duke University Press, 2006), 66
Home Remedies
Carl Louie, Toronto, 2019
“Loving one’s home is not about being fixed into a place, but rather it is about becoming part of a space where one has expanded one’s body, saturating the space with bodily matter: home as overflowing and flowingover”[1]
- Sara Ahmed
In his installation Home Remedies, Carl Marin captures the rhythm of things that gather on porches, kitchen tables, and backyards in the lived suburban space surrounding his mother’s home in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. Digitally manipulated anaglyph photographs mounted on IKEA countertop and shelf structures depict oscillating compositions that register the precarity of ordinary sensibilities — A Happy Birthday plate, faux china, a big jar of pennies, semi-deflated basketballs, white plastic chairs, garden bench, cement birdbath, backyard tree and soggy firewood.
The strange is made familiar by objects that extend our bodies in ways that make us feel at home.3The heaps of stuff we live with cohere into a moving assemblage that structures the sets through which one lives a life.The IKEA shelf, made of composite material and laminate, allows us to inhabit space-as-home, yet it could just as easily find itself in the backyard by the shed, warped and bloated. Things that pile up endure, but they sag over time. Shifting affects and attachments propel the circulation of objects in and around domestic sites establishing their use and emotional value in the present. [2]
A home is furnished by objects that have a certain place. We reach without hesitation with implicit knowledge about where things are. Losing things “…for this reason, can lead to moments of existential crisis: we expect to find ‘‘it’’ there, as an expectation that directs an action, and if ‘‘it’’ is not there, we might even worry that we are losing our minds along with our possessions.”[3]Objects that are ready-to-hand extend and ground our bodies in space. Yet, space is full of disruption and impediments and objects decay and de-form.
In the gallery, asymmetrical red and blue transparent screens, mediate our experience of each image. In Willow Blue, the broken edge of a white and blue rose patterned china plate is mended in one filter and the table is tidied through another. Object assemblages, shift between ontological states of disrepair and remedy, appearance and disappearance, liveness and exhaustion, never stabilizing or becoming situated in either. The anaglyph photograph points away from representation to the phenomenological experience of perception. We lose one perspective and are introduced to another, a process that happens again and again. But the ‘‘loss’’ itself is not empty or waiting; it is an object, thick with presence.
-Catherine Telford Keogh, 2018
[1]Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others(London: Duke University Press, 2006), 11.
[2]Lauren Berlant has described our attachment to objects as a cluster of promises that hold out a glimmer of the unachievable good lifedefined by upward mobility, job security, political and social equality, and durable intimacy. These attachments are “knotty tethering to objects, scenes and modes of life.” This tetheringsuggests an affective relationship in which bodies, things and space are pulled together in ways that produce and reproduce habits, beliefs and orientations. Berlant describes “‘cruel optimism’ as a relation of attachment to compromised conditions of possibility whose realization is discovered either to be impossible, sheer fantasy, or too possible, and toxic” Lauren Berlant,Cruel Optimism, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 24
[3]Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others(London: Duke University Press, 2006), 66