ObjectSubject

ObjectSubject combines visual and descriptive storytelling of personal relationships through object biographies.

The objects, often regarded as touchstones of past relationships, act as agents of shared experience now found at the improbable intersection of absence and presence. Material histories deposit into memory the small dramas of everyday lives and act as tangible placeholders for a time, place, or event that would otherwise exist only in the abstract.

Material histories reflect temporal continuity—with the object assuming the role of representative—such that a personal narrative of the past is easily reconstructed. Often, they propose their own surrogate relationship and serve to explore our understanding of the universal human experience of attachment to people and things.

The forty-eight objects were collected, photographed, and documented over a two-year period. While the contributors are anonymous, their gender is identified in the exhibition companion book of object-images and subject-stories.