DISTAUNCE
The quotidian is constituted, not of things, but of the effects playing over the surface of things.
-Lyn Hejinian “A Common Sense”
Distaunce is an obsolete variant of the word distance. The work in this series is a reflection on a reversal of the negative connotation connected to distance and as a result. The central idea being: nearness distanced to presence.
Distance, in this way, is a generative kindness. Familiarity can be a kind of inoculation; just enough of the thing to keep you from its actuality. Intimacy, of all kinds, is kept at bay by the status quo in our understanding. The world is an odd place, full of all sorts of odd things; pick one thing and consider it, do you perceive its strangeness? But what about it could be strange? Is there another world with which we are more familiar? A world that we map over this one, to gain an equilibrium of understanding? Or, is it perhaps, we are unaware of where we are? Distance provides a necessary defamiliarization. We can be near and yet estranged, but presence is a relational intimacy. The artist communicates but not in clarity necessarily, they communicate through questions, through obfuscation and obfuscation is a door.
