"Vestige", mezzotint, etching, screenprint, 2011
"Objects seems like witnesses, silent, unjudging, obdurate witnesses to the lives that go on in front of them, and it is for this reason that myths and fairytales have trees, stones, pictures that talk. 'If these walls could speak,' goes the old chestnut, for the world of ojbects seems to have been holding out on us fabulous and terrible histories that we can only imagine. Perhaps we imbue objects with associational meaning to bring their otherness back within the fold of the familiar, to make their muteness speak, to associate them with the absences we know rather than those more profound absences we do not. It is not the spiritual but the material world that seems most marvelous and strange: the course of these material histories, of the endlessly recycled elements and the almost immortal objects from clay pots to plastic toys, these stubborn, indecipherable, discreet things whose history of motion without change is no different than that of mutable willfull flesh."
--Rebecca Solnit, from the introductory essay in Once Removed: Portraits by J. John Priola, Arena Editions, 1998.
Johntimothy is Associate Professor of Printmaking at the University of South Dakota. His out-of-date, still worth investigating, website can be found here!
