Photographic Still Life

Abstract

Drawing on the painterly tradition of the still life form Photographic Still Life expounds two aspects relating to our interaction with art objects. Firstly, that they are indeed objects and secondly that they demonstrate the ‘work’ of art, or rather that they are things that have a ‘thingly’ nature. For Heidegger, the things around us, including artworks within the current aesthetic paradigm, are rooted firmly within an established subject-object order that ‘enframes’ our understanding of the world as well as our encounters with art. By revealing the objects used to create the artworks as things like any other (the jug, the lightmeter, the camera) I hope to identify both the subject matter and the artworks themselves as objects in the world. Secondly, because our encounters with art cannot be defined within the existing subject-object dichotomy, it is their inherent ‘equipmentality’, their location within space and time, which constitutes their existence and our ontological relation to them.