How to Explain a Dead Hare to Pictures
2025-2026
Digital photographs 
 

Using the language of abstract expressionist photographer Aaron Siskind to take portaits of worn and discarded materials.  

Taking hints from Rothko: Zooming in on a flattened, textural plane where the gesture of decay or destruction is the source of the emotional content/the identity of the object. These are not decaying objects, the decay is the object.  

Picking up strings from my Shed project: mourning the loss of objects without clear utility to people.  

Reversing Joseph Beuy’s performance piece ‘How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare’ to ask us to empathize with materials that have no eyes or mouth.

 
“...to remove the time stain is to harm the actual thing, because a thing actually is this temporal staining. To want to cleanse a building of what is taken to be a supplementary stain is to assume that a thing underlies its appearance, the old default substance ontology. To allow things to get dirty is to allow that things are not at war with time.”

[Objects] “aren’t pristine, pure things, but pockmarked and pitted and oozing with all kinds of inconsistencies and anomalies – just like human beings…a thing’s function or purpose doesn’t exhaust it. It just might not be your design or function or a human purpose in particular. Which is the same thing as saying you are having a conversation with utilitarianism, which is saying that you are having a conversation about happiness – whose happiness, and what kinds of happiness? Which means that you are having a conversation with what is probably something you think of as an inanimate object, like a block of ice, which means you are allowing yourself to be in a telepathic mind meld with something that stands for the worst possible fate of a human subject, being turned into an object.”

- Timothy Morton in ‘All Art is Ecological’ (2021)