could you hold up/this for a second is driven by an impulse: a new process of making where the artist’s body becomes a temporary site – a protective shell for the malleable material that slowly solidifies. Held patiently, with time, the object “breaks” to become a thing that subverts the current zeitgeist of the fast, convenient, now, enabled by those hand-held devices from which we are inseparable. Through a symbiotic act of creation, the utilitarian value of the object is decoupled, lost.

A feminine hand has intervened, reclaiming form with contradiction: partly controlling, partly surrendering to the material’s unpredictable transitory nature. The repeated, indexical (and unreplicable) performance takes place behind-the-scenes, its anti-immediacy unknown and unseen. What is encountered are smooth curves that evoke those of a body. The body’s fragility and temporality – traditionally ignored – are reinforced by plaster; a material of multiples, the inbetween, the fringes. Here, however, it is intentionally obscured by a textured layer of imitation stone – evoking an illusory strength – a nature-like moiré that interferes with our looking through.

Do you see a phone? Or a phone case? What does it mean to cast not the object but its disregarded, protective layer – yet another liminal, physical shell that mediates our experience of the real?

For now we can encircle a defamiliarized object, and perhaps we might catch a small glimpse of the real thing.