Gould Library

Nightingale & Rose Souvenir, the Nightingale and the Rose series, 2017, cast porcelain with gold luster

Artist's Statement:

In the spirit of cabinets of curiosity or Wunderkammer, the vitrines in Boliou Hall and Gould library showcase a collection of relics and artifacts from the past five years of an artist’s practice in the field of contemporary art.

The Things that make The Things cabinet in Boliou acts as an art historical timeline, tracing fragments of thoughts behind four major series of Katayoun Amjadi’s work. The objects on display are like archeological excavations from her studio and apartment. Some are personal treasures and some are found objects that sparked her curiosity, while others are the tools and materials that were used to make various works within a series. Each carries its own history, its own web of associations, yet most remain hidden from view in the work they make or inspire. They reside just below what is readily apparent in the space of suggestive possibility. On the opposite wall from the cabinet, is an image of the work; on one hand epitomizing and representing the time spent on each series, on the other a step removed from the object itself, as if seeing the artifact from a spatial and temporal distance. Between the vitrine and the wall you stand in the realm of the archeological discovery of an artist’s work: the nexus of manifold histories, connections and networks, twisting like the strange fibers of narrative threads, waiting for the creative response and interface of what both the artist and the viewer bring to the work.

A Bunch of Chickens and a Toilet Brush in the vitrines of Gould library are just that: a collection of displaced art objects detached from the origin and context that brought them into being. This work explores the voice of the common object, the everyday artifact, which quite often, by virtue of its generality and pervasiveness, has fallen into a kind of muted silence. Chicken and toilet brush: one we see almost daily, while the other we tend to hide from view, yet here, through a series of reconfiguring and material translations new meanings begin to unfold. This work examines the potential for objects to speak beyond themselves; that through careful appropriation and transformation, the muted silence of the everyday object could be developed into a grammar of meaning that recognizes its history of utility and cultural consignment, yet suggests evocative possibilities of new narratives, of stories whose arcs embody new disclosure and promise.

-Katayoun Amjadi