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For Dr. Sarah Alford
CRSM 621A Winter 2021 – Craft Discourse 1
Patrick Moskwa - 024671
MFA Candidate, AUArts.
Submitted April 25, 2021
(This paper contains images of sensitive subject matter).
Listening to the Poetry of Images: A brief encounter with affective objects.
I cannot start this paper without stating the obvious: All things are affective. Given the nature of
our connection to objects, their everyday use, and their prevalence in our daily lives, things affect
us. They force themselves on us whether we want them to or not. You’re not listening to me talk
to you about this; you’re reading these words. Maybe you’re reading them on a computer that
keeps crashing or is so slow that every time you try to change the page, there is a lag. Perhaps
your new laptop is gloriously fast, but you’re reading it outside with the sun hitting your back
with a glare on the screen. You could have printed it off on clean white paper and held it together
with a staple that didn’t quite catch properly, giving you micro lashes every time you flip the
page. Or maybe like me, you’ve taken the draft into the tub with you and covered it with marks,
the paper slowly curling from the humidity of the water, the ink slightly slipping from the
surface in a gentle watercolour softness. Either way, the object is affecting you, your position in
space and how you hold it. Your choice of material in reading this has a personal appeal to it, an
emotion without language.
“Unlike emotion, which is social, and feeling, which is personal, affect is considered pre- personal: a nonconscious experience of intensity” (Shouse 2005). Pre-conscious. Poetic, image
as poetry, poetry as pre-conscious, untethered from reality, pre-reality. Gaston Bachelard in The
Poetics of Space (1960) suggests that language is the death of things. Bear with me as I am
reading too closely into these words. Poetry is language, but it is the language that transcends
consciousness. Poetry is affective. Is that not the purpose? Poetry moves us and engages our
senses before we pull truth from it and apply our banality, arranging the words side by side in an
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analytical convention. The death I refer to is the death of affection. The silencing of the poetry
that once presents us with an ethereality now becomes domestic and clichéd. Objects contain
poetry; the image is poetry, not language.
Images can exert this somewhat irrational negotiation. The instant that Bachelard speaks of is
present in our reading of the image, an intensity that causes “movement” in us. The instant is part
of a notion that philosophers like Deleuze, Foucault, Adorno, Bachelard, Whitehead, Merleau- Ponty etc., refer to as becoming. A moment, an occasion, compounded in a perpetual state of
becoming. Unlike language that lives as a solid concrete state, the instant is where poetry lives;
in a continual becoming, fluid, changing, and mutable state. I believe this is where affect resides,
Affect is promiscuous.
In the following pages, I will present five artistic works that help organize a more rounded
approach to the theories of affect. A more, dare I say, concretizing this intangible idea and
relating my research within this discourse. I will discuss Janine Antoni and Stephen Petronio’s
Honey Baby 2013, Max Colby’s Dopey 2020, a Nicklas Hultman still-life photograph from his
Baroqueikebana series 2019, Fanny Ollas’s ceramic vessels, and Maria José Arjona’s But I am
the Tiger 2013. I have chosen this discursive selection of pieces to highlight the aspects of affect
inherent in each. I will tie my work into this complex discourse. My work skirts the limits of
craft, visual art, performance, media art, and architecture. Within this complex practice, a
common way to connect the work is through affect.
The five pieces I will discuss address domesticity in some way or another. Antoni’s work uses
the body as a tool to create the work and leave the body’s residue within the material of the
subject-object. This piece looks at the fetal movements of a body in a pool of honey. The film is
very much about motherhood and the domestic limits of home; it presents a disruption or
discontinuance of our relationship to such a home. Colby’s work uses everyday discarded
materials, people’s unwanted things, exploring assemblage of these ordinary objects that are
containers of domestic stories. Colby arranges them in wall hangings, pillows, and table
centrepieces, reminiscent of domestic decorations, using vibrantly coloured and detailed
constructions in a unique narrative style, crafting them a second life. Hultman’s still-lifes are a
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nod to Vermeer and his contemporaries, investigating the mundanity of the classic domestic still- life through contemporary everyday objects, arranged with a focus and style of Ikebana
(Japanese floral arrangement). Fanny Ollas brings whimsy and play to her vessels, looking
rather cheekily at the vessel from an anthropomorphic sensibility in the most charming and
peculiar ways. Maria José Arjona’s But I am the Tiger is a long-duration performance,
rearranging a pile of rubble into curiously and strictly controlled knolled images. This section
will discuss the durational performance of transforming the ordinary pile of waste into a
fetishized art object. This performance is not dissimilar to the constant rearranging of the items
in the middle of our dining table.
“Affect arises in the midst of in between-ness: in the capacities to act and be acted upon.
Affect is an impingement or extrusion of a momentary or sometimes more sustained state
of relation as well as the passage (and the duration of passage) of forces or intensities.
That is, affect is found in those intensities that pass body to body (human, nonhuman,
part-body, and otherwise), in those resonances that circulate about, between, and
sometimes stick to bodies and worlds, and in the very passages or variations between
these intensities and resonances themselves. Affect, at its most anthropomorphic, is the
name we give to those forces—visceral forces beneath, alongside, or generally other than
conscious knowing, vital forces insisting beyond emotion—that can serve to drive us
toward movement, toward thought and extension, that can likewise suspend us (as if in
neutral) across a barely registering accretion of force-relations, or that can even leave us
overwhelmed by the world’s apparent intractability. Indeed, affect is persistent proof of a
body’s never less than ongoing immersion in and among the world’s obstinacies and
rhythms, its refusals as much as its invitations.” (Seigworth & Gregg 2010)
Feelings are a personal and biographical organization of experiences based on prescribed
possibilities situated in our past experiences, including knowledge and language. A person does
not experience a specific feeling unless that person is aware of the potential. This is to say that
affect is a set of potentialities, instances of intensity in relations between bodies, without
language and embodied in poetry.
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Fig. 1. Honey Baby, 2013. Antoni and Petronio.
Janine Antoni and Stephan Petronio
Honey Baby, 2013 (fig. 1) is a collaboration between Janine Antoni and Stephan Petronio,
created as a reaction to the sonograms that Petronio shared with Antoni of his sister’s pregnancy.
Petronio is a choreographer, and Antoni is a performance artist. Honey Baby was not their first
piece together but was their first collaboration in the sense of conjoined efforts. Inspired by the
positions she saw in the images, Antoni suggested they recreated this experience in honey, a
material with similar consistencies and reminiscent of embryonic fluid. Both Antoni and
Petronio’s work deal with physical spatial boundaries, the limits of the sculpture or edges of the
page, the surface of the gallery floor or wall, and even the stage floor, set, and the viewing
perspective. As this is a video piece, not a live performance, the use of the monitor as a viewing
apparatus is evocative of the monitors used to view the prenatal fetus. The boundaries within the
bezel of the monitor apprehend our experience of the outside world and close it off to this one
strict viewing position, where the walls in the film become ambiguous and emphasize sensuous
claustrophobia.
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The movement of the nude male figure is slow and delicate. The fourteen-minute film provides a
provocative sense of restraint and containment, with a gradual movement of the lens closer to the
subject until space collapses the viewer up against the body. The actions are anthropomorphic,
intended to replicate the activities of a fetus, and hence have a direct relationship to the human
body. The intensity provided in the male figure’s interaction with the honey and the confines of
the cylindrical container are, in a way, rather erotic and claustrophobic. The sensual movements
and sounds are translated in provocative colour and brilliant sound design, not typically captured
in still images. The honey is illuminated from behind, providing an intoxicating glow,
highlighting the shadows created as the body moves slowly through. The way the honey clings to
and envelopes the body is inebriating, flirting materially with eroticism. Like other materials
Antoni uses in her work, honey is an aphrodisiac.
“The very word “honeymoon” stems from the hope for a sweet marriage. Some say
honey’s romantic reputation comes from an ancient custom in which newly married
couples drank mead, a fermented beverage made with honey, until the first moon of their
new union. Hippocrates prescribed honey for sexual vigour. According to an old French
wives’ tale, a bee sting was supposedly like being given a shot of pure aphrodisiac.
Honey contains boron, which may regulate hormone levels, and nitric oxide, which is
released in the blood during arousal. It’s also a symbol of fertility and procreation in
some cultures” (Avey, 2014).
It is no wonder this piece can arouse us in ways maybe unintended, or ways that we don’t
particularly understand, with no words to describe fully. Arousal may not be the best explanation
or term used to label the intensity of this piece, but it certainly upsets and conflicts with the
subject matter we are watching.
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Fig. 2. Dopey, 2020. Max Colby
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senses. Dopey is an abrupt and intense experience only softened by the physicality of the supple
materials; found fabrics, fabric flowers, plastic embellishments, thread and polyester batting.
One can imagine the smell of the second-hand store, an amalgamation of mouldy basements and
dusty cupboards. The clashing colours are garish, vibrant, lively, almost offensive and
disobedient, yet somehow charming. It is almost through the colours alone that there is a second
coming of being, an aggressive impulse of material agency that captures us like a car crash.
Like a car crash? (That came out of the blue, pun intended). The colours draw us in, repulse us;
they throw us into a controlled spin like a vintage carrousel on “adult” speed, the viewer being
pressed against the side of the horse as it frantically bobs up and down. Dopey takes us for a ride
back in time, in a spatial relationship with our memory and informs nostalgia into a spatial
emotion, albeit a chaotic one. Like being trapped inside a tumbling Rubik’s Cube, full of
turbulence and desire. Affect is about transformation, and Colby’s work essentially captures that
effervescent phallic potential. Yes, phallic, the promiscuous quality of the work is ostentatious.
“[The work] is alternately domestic, floral, phallic, voluptuous, and literally fringy” (Osenlund
2013).
Nicklas Hultman
Nicklas Hultman’s series titled Baroqueikebana began in 2019, is a study of nonsense made
painfully beautiful. At once, Hultman’s series of still-life images are restrained, austere,
conspicuous, careful, mundane, surprising, striking and absurd. Nicklas is a graphic designer and
art director, photographer, and artist. This series takes its name from 2 distinct “genres” of
Baroque still-life and Ikebana floral arrangement. The assemblages that take shape are a
combination of everyday, banal materials, combined with domestic vegetation, sometimes
flowers, fruits, and vegetables, (carrots in this example). A cheekiness resides in some of the
constructions, introducing uniquely queer and sexualized iconography like butt plugs, lube,
dildos, and shoes, plastic straws, eggs, and cleaning materials etc. “With influences of Dutch
Baroque painters and the Japanese art of flower arrangement, Ikebana, his still-lifes exude a
poetic beauty despite their surprisingly banal (and at times suggestive) components” (Barba-
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Court 2019). Unlike Colby’s work that uses Camp and excess as a narrative device, Hultman’s
pieces use a restrain found in Ikebana. Ikebana is a Japanese form of floral arrangement. “In
contrast to the western habits of casually placing flowers in a vase, Ikebana aims to bring out the
inner qualities of flowers and other live materials and express emotion” (Cenci 2018). “Ikebana
is the art of beautifully arranging cut stems, leaves, and flowers in vases and other containers that
evolved in Japan over seven centuries. To arrange the stems and flowers exactly as one wishes,
familiarity with many different ways of fastening and positioning them is necessary” (Jansson
2019).
Fig. 3 Baroqueikebana series, 2019, ongoing. Nicklas Hultman
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Hultman usually reveals the fastening devices. Otherwise, the arrangement is intentionally
precarious to invite a sense of tension. In this image, items are positioned amongst a household
brick, a common element seen in most of the series. Arranged on both the ground plane and the
brick are cut carrots that stand next to a black butt plug, all dripping with personal lubricant.
Behind the carrots on the left of the images is a bound bundle of dried sage, resting against two
erect tree branches. Tied with twine to the central tree branch is a twig of poison ivy with the
foliage and the flowers intact. According to Ikebana tradition, each element carries a symbolic
meaning. Concerning male genitalia, the carrots are an obvious start, with an easy and playful
nod sexual activity through the lubricant and the butt plug. The bundled branches could be a nod
to the phallus and the poison ivy, a reference to a beautiful yet dangerous act. Or possibly the ivy
is a cheeky way to reference “scratching or rubbing”; or possibly to a fetish I am not familiar.
What is the intent with the sage? In Canada, sage bundles are an indigenous flora used to smudge
or cleanse the aura of a place. However, in Sweden, the meaning may be partially lost. That
said, sage is a ritual cleansing element not uncommon in nations around the world. So maybe it
is a reference to ritual courtship in queer hook-ups or casting out the demon after a terrible hook- up. Whatever the desired purpose is, the overall concept is delightfully affective. This work
invites an intimate sense of curiosity, a generous provocation to its audience, borrowed from
Ikebana.
References to Vermeer are pungent in the series. The Dutch still-life painters created compelling
images of everyday mundane life through rich, visually robust fetishizations of the subjects that
cause the viewer to get lost in the sensual detail and care in their execution. Hultman echos the
Baroque use of deep shadows and strong highlights from a single light source, at times with
minutiae seemingly divinely lit. A concerted effort is put forth in the series to emulate but not
replicate the chiaroscuro found in Dutch master’s images.
There is an elusive quality within this piece that captures and moves me. Something in the deep
shadowy background, the play of light, the precise arrangements make me tingle with
excitement. Something about the intimacy invited in the image compels me to spend time with it.
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I can smell the fresh-cut carrot, the damp coldness of the brick, the wetness of the lubricant, and
the intense intemperance of the poison ivy.
Queer art is loaded and heavy with affect. Given LGBTQ+ artists have a lot of baggage we carry
around, it is not unusual to consider the intensity of examining the self and cultures of oppression
that have surrounded us for decades. However, there remains a heaviness to the way queer art is
perceived even within the community. Michel Foucault speculates:
“I am not at all sure that the best form of literary creation by gay people is gay novels...
What do we mean, for instance, by ‘gay painting’? Yet, I am sure that from the point of
departure of our ethical choices, we can create something that will have a certain relation
to gayness. But it must not be a translation of gayness in the field of music or painting or
what have you, for I do not think this can happen” (Foucault 1984).
While written almost 40 years ago, there is still an err of caution when presenting such strong
visuals of queer life and identity in Colby and Hultman’s images. This threat is abundant with
affect, as it provokes crosshairs from all sorts of unexpected corners. Their work is nothing less
than a feat of strength and potential for chaos, which I would posit is precisely what Hultman and
Colby are striving for.
Maria José Arjona.
We come again to another performance artist, Maria José Arjona. Arjona’s piece But I am the
Tiger is a long-duration, labour-intensive performance, where she moves a pile of stone and
brick waste from one side of the gallery, a fist-full at a time. She arranges them in intricately
placed patterns or “knolls” on suspended platforms on the opposite side of the gallery. Arjona
references Jorge Luis Borges’ poem in the title of this piece,
“Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am
the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes
me, but I am the fire.” Jorge Luis Borges, A New Refutation of Time (1944-46)
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Fig. 4. But I am the Tiger, 2013. Maria José Arjona
A unique aspect of spatialized time is resonant in this piece. “In Arjona’s research, the body
interacts with space to create an experience, which bypasses corporeality with cognitive
responses, and the observer becomes the catalyst of a sensorial exchange, beyond the fluid
borders situated between identity and representation” (Charpentier 2013). The work elicits a
sympathy with the body, both Arjona’s and our own, placing ourselves directly into the
experience with Arjona. We imagine the texture of the objects as she kneels to pick them up, the
weight as she moves across the gallery floor, the size and shape as she arranges them. The waste
is inconsequential in this case. However, the question arises in the viewer, “why is she moving a
pile of rubble?” While this performance is exceptionally long, eight hours per day, seven days
per week for several weeks, there is contiguity in the viewers’ reaction. She creates anticipation
and agitation in the viewer that is immediate and ongoing. Affect isn’t always a pleasant
instance; it can be ugly. The work is certainly not ugly, but it elicits a desire to move faster or
recognize the need to slow down in ourselves. With its meticulous placement of the rubble, the
performance also draws on us a feeling of relaxation, well, me at least. I find solace in “things
organized neatly” (see thingsorganizedneatly.tumblr.com). There is also an overwhelming sense
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of satisfaction when the piece is viewed multiple times. A gratification that appeals to our desires
for completing a task and the relief inherent in that completion.
The mundanity of the pile of rocks and debris allows us to look to our own piles of debris
collected around our houses. Be it the pile of mail on the table, the recycling by the door that
overflows the container, or the one last compression of the trash we’re too tired to take out.
While we don’t all have piles of rocks and bricks in our homes, we have domestic “baggage” that
needs tending. Our reaction, or at least mine, to the slow, methodical movement and organization
is offensive (get on with it, here’s a shovel) but also deep-seated satisfaction with the resulting
sculptural form created.
Again, it is challenging to pinpoint why this piece is compelling; it shows the affective relation
to the subject and the artist’s agency over us and the objects over her. The material’s agency is
simple; whatever will fit in her hands is what gets moved. The material has a direct impact and
relation to the artist. It acts on her in a certain way that compels her actions. I am not sure if this
adds to the discourse of affect, but I do not see how it cannot. If the material has agency over the
artist or the viewer, how can it not affect us?
The last four pieces rely heavily on the use of material and material agency to provoke affect.
Material agency “generally entails the notion that material objects have an effect on the course of
action that is irreducible to direct human intervention” (Van Oyen 2018). While material and
matter have generally been disregarded as having any sort of ontology, material theories in the
forms of Flat Ontology, Material Agency, and Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) have begun
taking hold in the research of Material Studies. The research and approaches involve an agency
and ontology present in matter itself, in an artifact, not just in the human. It sets up a
symmetrical relationship between the human and the object, which can become problematic if
read in certain lights without much effort. It can posit a human as a thing – which without
question is a pitfall of such theories. Material agency doesn’t remove the human from the
dialogue as OOO does. Instead, it posits an agency within the object or even more directly to the
material that cannot exist without human interaction and intervention.
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In Honey Baby, Dopey, the Baroqueikebana series, and But I am the Tiger, materials become
more than simple “passive instruments or empty shells for social symbols and meaning” (Van
Oyen 2018). They take on agency and value, the material tells a story and exudes ontology that
pulls in the viewer. The materials act as a conduit for affect.
More specific to Colby, Hultman, and Arjona, in an entry for the The Encyclopedia of
Archaeological Sciences, titled “Material Agency” from 2018, Astrid Van Oyen writes,
“The most recent take on material agency to have been adopted in archaeology is
assemblage theory, combining elements of ANT’s [Actor-Network Theory] radical
ontological position with a notion of organic flows akin to Ingold and some of the
phenomenological tradition. Gilles Deleuze is its main proponent, but in the meantime,
assemblage theory has become a motley assortment of approaches, associated with
theorists such as Manuel DeLanda and Jane Bennett (see new materialisms). All share a
view of agency as distributed across heterogeneous assemblages, whose sum is greater
than their parts. Assemblage theory holds particular attraction for archaeologists because
of its promise of accommodating scalar transitions; its emphasis on temporality as flows;
and its affinity with archaeology’s stock vocabulary of the “assemblage” (see
assemblage).”
Fanny Ollas
I want to share one final artist’s work, that of Fanny Ollas. Ceramic vessel structure and
components are full of anthropomorphic labels like mouth, lip, neck, shoulder, belly/body, and
foot. In the makers’ mind, they consider this language as they throw and trim the vessel on the
wheel or hand-build the parts. The act of making ceramic vessels is sensuous and dirty, drawing
on all sorts of movie references that need not be described. What can you do with a vessel to take
it into the most delightfully playful and charming form but turn the vessels into strikingly
visceral things? Fanny Ollas uses this visceral quality to bring life to her anthropomorphized
objects, imbuing them with energy and personality through frumpy forms and tired postures.
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Reminiscent of the beeps and bops of R2D2 from the space opera Star Wars, Ollas’ forms create
an immediate appeal, an instant more akin to meeting a lonely puppy than seeing a table full of
pottery. Fanny doesn’t simply add a human face or googly eyes, nor does she create figurative
work. Instead, she relies on the bodily language of the vessel to reference human pretences.
Again, like R2D2, Ollas tugs on our heartstrings with gentle whimsy and thoughtful gestures that
strike a chord in the viewer.
Fig. 5. Vessels, 2017-2021. Fanny Ollas
She uses subtle, muted colours with delicate lines and voluptuous folds, echoing an old lady
sitting on the beach in a lawn chair, catching a light breeze under an umbrella as she nods off for
a short nap, spilling her gin and tonic. The vessels mascaraed as autonomous beings. However,
one cannot simply assume that this vessel will suddenly stand up and move to a shaded corner of
the room; one can imagine the gentle caress needed to lift and cradle the vessel as you move it to
a new location to watch the children playing through the window. These vessels invite us to
create stories for them, to participate in their imagined lives, in a very intimate and sophisticated
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way. The surfaces are imperfectly perfect; the folds feel generous and soft like the bosom of
your favourite great aunt, ample for snuggling and being read your favourite story. Nostalgia
again pops into mind, not from a homesick perspective, but a notion of love and comfort. Big
Hero Six, a comic book and film by the team at Marvel Comics, focuses on a relationship
between a young boy and his autonomous robot named Baymax. Baymax is an personal
healthcare companion in the form of a giant, cuddly, inflatable robot. In the film released in
2014, Baymax refers to its large form (akin to a Sumo Wrestler) as “less threatening.” Ollas’
objects have this similar non-threatening appeal which sways us into a sense of comfort. The
immediacy of a reaction influences the potential of these objects from mere vessels to things. It
is hard to imagine anyone commenting that “objects don’t have personalities” when one engages
with Ollas’ ceramics. They even wear tutus and pearls!
Craft, Latex, and Me.
How do I begin when there really is no pure state for affect? Do I present my work and describe
it as above, attempting to capture a certain “common” quality throughout the work, or do I focus
on a few key pieces? Instead, I will look back at considerations made in the work and comment
loosely through these breadcrumbs.
“Without affect feelings do not “feel” because they have no intensity, and without
feelings rational decision-making becomes problematic (Damasio 204-22). In short,
affect plays an important role in determining the relationship between our bodies, our
environment, and others, and the subjective experience that we feel/think as affect
dissolves into experience” (Shouse 2005).
A common thread carries between my work with domestic and banal object and materiality
(addressing home, safety, and security, within that containment) with those of the artists
discussed. To pinpoint the affective aspects of each, the connections I see shared are: disrupted
and disoriented subject-object in Antoni and Petronio’s Honey Baby, Colby’s use of colour, in
Hultman’s series, the use of assemblage and material clarity, Arjona’s duration, and Ollas’ form.
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My objects are disruptive and disobedient, challenging, comforting and uncomfortable. The
subjects presented in most of my work are a simple retelling of the form inherent in the source
object. Through materiality, I change that relationship, as the work becomes a skin, a reference
to and a referent of that object of domestic life. In this material change, the previous subject
becomes diluted in a pool of ambiguity, making limp the connection to the last and giving
newfound agency to the skin. There lies an eroticism in the material that invites intimacy and
compulsion in the viewer, a power struggle. Materials like butter, bacon fat, chocolate, latex,
leather, soap, and lavender, disrupt the origins of the object and upset the truth. The materials are
as flagrant as they are fragrant. They invite the viewer to an imagined engagement, as the viewer
imagines using clothespins made of fat, the desire to lick their fingers after its use, and when
used, leaves residue on the clothes instead of a crisp, clean scent of fresh air.
Fig. 6. Shovel, 2021. Patrick Moskwa
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I use colour in a way to evoke a corporeal essence, a skin-like quality. Moreso, the pale, neutral
palette of the work is ethereal and provocative. Again, sensuously erotic in its nudity, almost like
walking into a dance club full of shirtless men. The quietness of the colour triggers discomfort
when engaging with the object, as the colours of the objects in our memory are distinctly
different. A crystal decanter becomes pale Caucasian flesh, a toothbrush of pale skin and blonde
hair, white chocolate, and butter are almost colourless.
Fig. 7. Buckets, 2021. Patrick Moskwa Fig. 8. Three-Way, 2021. Patrick Moskwa
A tower of bricks made of soap, referencing a violent act and a subsequent feeling of being dirty
and exposed, ties to the objective materiality of Hultmans’ still-lifes. Stacked with an unsteady
precision, placed in relation to the residue of a violent performance and a quiet, unassuming dust
brush and bin made of latex, leather, and dried lavender. The three hold a tenuous balance of
space and scale. The dust bin of moulded leather sits on the floor, sheltered from the
performance by the stack of soap bricks. While these three pieces act independently, they begin
to tell a more emotional story, one of pain, self-reflexivity, shame, cleansing, and deliberately
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beautiful rebellion when assembled in the installation. The lavender is poised to clean up and
leave more traces of itself behind.
Fig. 9. Dust Bin and Bruch, Brick Stack and Performance. Installation View 2021
Durational acts are spread through several pieces, asking the audience to embrace anticipation
and sympathy. They make time spatial by casting a latex rug in the center of a room, slowly
filling the void with breath, slowly taking up space. Eight hours of breathing through a tube to
fill two hundred cubic feet of volume amid a global pandemic adds tension to the otherwise
calm, slow, and gentle progression of breathing.
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Fig. 10. Clothes Hanger, 2021 Whiskey Decanter object and Video Performance, 2020. Installation View 2021.
The forms of my work are flaccid, loose, intentionally unstructured, with a certain amount of
care in how limp and formless they become when active. Some are sturdier than others, while
some fall limp as a direct association to their skin-like qualities, tugging on the audience with a
strange sense of comfort, desire, and humour. A limp latex candle holder holds an unimaginable
character, much like Ollas’ vessels and the lamp at the beginning of Pixar films. Each fragment
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of the object nudges a sensitivity from the viewer and the maker as well, like a dog’s nose gently
asking for affection.
The objects I create have a particular agency over me. I make them, and suddenly they take on an
ontology, they become. Through fetishizing the object, they grow, change, and transform into
something very different. They challenge the viewer, or at least I hope they do, to see the object
as a new thing, not just a container for the idea of what it once was. They are frottages of
domestic objects, items that most people have and use daily. They intrinsically carry meaning
and connection to the audiences’ intimate lives. They force themselves into your life, your home,
without permission. Home - penetrated by a flaccid object.
Fig. 11. Remote Control with Dog Hair, 2020. Patrick Moskwa.
The object, in its corporeality, invites intimacy; its agency begins to fetishize the maker. Taking
a step back, it is essential to note the agency these objects have over me. In turn, viewing the
objects and performances, they have agency on the viewer. They are asking the viewer for an
acceptance of the uncomfortable.
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“In what undoubtedly had become one of the most oft-cited quotations concerning affect,
Baruch Spinoza maintained, “No one has yet determined what a body can do” (1959 87).
Two key aspects are immediately worth emphasizing, or re-emphasizing here; first, the
capacity of a body is never defined by a body alone but is always aided and abetted by,
and dovetails with, the field or context of its force-relations; and second, the “not yet” of
“knowing the body” is still very much with us more than 330 years after Spinoza
composed his Ethics. But, as Spinoza recognized, this issue is never the generic figuring
of “the body” (any body) but, much more singularly, endeavouring to configure a body
and its affects/affectedness, its ongoing affectual composition of a world, the this-ness of
a world and a body” (Seigworth and Gregg 2010).
My work focuses on place, particularly home and the idea of home, my body - an ambiguity or
liminal quality of intangible space between the physical and the metaphysical. In that limes, lives
affect.
Page 23 of 26
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https://www.pbs.org/food/the-history-kitchen/10-edible-aphrodisiacs/. Accessed April 02, 2021
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Barba-Court, Kala. “Nicklas Hultman Unearths the Beauty in Trash in Baroqueikebana.” PLAIN
Magazine, May 07, 2019, https://plainmagazine.com/nicklas-hultman-unearths-the-beauty-in- trash-in-baroqueikebana/.
Best, Susan. Visualizing Feeling: Affect and the Feminine Avant-Garde. I. B. Tauris, 2011.
Braswell, Sean. “When Nostalgia Was Considered a Debilitating Disease.” OZY, 21 Nov. 2018,
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Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” Routledge, 2011.
Cenci, Natalie. “What Is Ikebana? The Japanese Art That’s Making a Comeback.” Artsy, March 21.
2018, https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-thriving-art-ikebana-japanese-tradition-flower- arranging. (Accessed April 20, 2021)
Charpentier, Mo. Pero-Yo-Soy-el-Tigre_Press-Release_EN, 2013
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Dussart, Francoise. “Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory” American Anthropologist, vol.
102, no. 4, Dec. 2000, pp. 938–39. DOI.org (Crossref), doi:10.1525/aa.2000.102.4.938.
Edwards, Jason. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. “Affects” Routledge, 2009. (pp107-120)
Finke, Marcel, and Friedrich Weltzien, editors. State of Flux: Aesthetics of Fluid Materials. “Thinking
Through Foam; Art Agency, Aphrology,” Reimer, 2017, pp137-160
Jansson, Amanda, et al. “Nicklas Hultman – BaroqueIkebana.” KALTBLUT Magazine, 30 Aug. 2019,
https://www.kaltblut-magazine.com/nicklas-hultman-baroqueikebana/.
Knudsen, Britta Timm, and Carsten Stage, editors. Affective Methodologies. Palgrave Macmillan UK,
2015. DOI.org (Crossref), doi:10.1057/9781137483195.
Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings. Harvard University Press, 2004.
Osenlund, Kurt, R.et al. “12 Queer Artists Whose Work Is Making Us Pay Attention.” NBC News,
https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/12-queer-artists-whose-work-making-us-pay- attention-n1100646. Accessed April 22. 2021.
Seigworthy, Gregory J., Gregg, Melissa (Editors). Affect Theory Reader. “An Inventory of Shimmers”
Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2010, pp.1-25
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Sontag, Susan. “Notes on Camp.” 1964,
https://monoskop.org/images/5/59/Sontag_Susan_1964_Notes_on_Camp.pdf (Accessed April
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Page 26 of 26
Images:
Fig. 1. Honey Baby film still, 2013. Janine Antoni and Stephn Petronio
http://www.janineantoni.net/honey-baby
Fig. 2. Dopey, 2020. Max Colby
https://www.maxcolby.com/y8n3noljftvbiakvfmza2otjoq1tg1
Fig. 3. Baroqueikebana series. 2019. Nicklas Hultman
https://pnpplzine.com/index.php/2019/04/07/nicklas-hultman/
Fig. 4. But I am the Tiger, 2013. Maria José Arjona
https://www.eugenioviola.com/mara-jos-arjona
Fig. 5. Vessels, 2017-2021, Fanny Ollas
https://www.fannyollas.com/
Fig. 6. Shovel, 2021. Patrick Moskwa
Fig. 7. Buckets, 2021. Patrick Moskwa
Fig. 8. Three-Way, 2021. Patrick Moskwa
Fig. 9. Dust Bin and Brush 2021, Soap Bricks 2021, and Performance. Installation View 2021.
Patrick Moskwa
Fig. 10. Clothes Hanger, 2021 Whiskey Decanter 2020 and Video Performance, 2020.
Installation View 2021.
Fig. 11. Remote Control with Dog Hair, 2020. Patrick Moskwa.