Silver, wax tealight candles, insects
The evening my marriage ended 24 insects committed suicide. It was a kamikaze mission. All flew directly into the flame of candles I had placed around my campsite. Their found corpses form the crux of this work.
These wax containers resonate as frozen moments in time, metaphorical photographs imbued with a melancholy nostalgia. As a symbolic mediator of ephemeral experience, I cast silver bubble wands from the common plastic kind to cradle the residue of the insect's encounters with the tealight candle flames.
The milieu of the installation mimics that of scientific documentation: the insect acts as specimen, the cool silver bubble wand performs as an inspection device. But the juxtaposition subverts the very function of an archive's sense of permanence, exposing the fragility of memory and history. They testify only to ephemerality and the passing of time itself.
Silver, wax tealight candles, insect
Akin to Victorian mourning jewelry, these pieces embody the notion of the sacred memento as an object for mourning. With these pieces, I sought to elevate the residue of the insect's encounter with the candle flame to jewel status. Cultural metaphors, such as "the moth to the flame", are conjured to speak to the insect's enigmatic attraction to light. I regard the phenomenon as an ultimate metaphor for the human condition, archetypal of our own cultural draw toward lightness. These wax subsumed corpses are indicative of what we eternally attempt to capture. But lightness is intangible, belonging to the realm of the fleeting––we only see glimpses of it. Nothing more than a signifier, the precious memento embodies loss, the absence of lightness. The keeping precious of ephemeral experience and our attachment to the myth of permanence is epitomized here: were the slightest heat to draw near these pieces, the wax would melt and the residue would evaporate.
Silver, wax tealight candles, insect