About the work

We sometimes forget that the world is almost entirely made of inside jokes. Not jokes that are shared, exactly, but moments, gestures, whole swathes of life that only make sense if you were already there. They don’t travel. The details of them, the textures and temperatures, stay put. They are hermetic. And yet we still try, don’t we, to gather ourselves into these little knots of understanding, to pull together what cannot quite be pulled together. A folding chair is good for this, its lightness, its impermanence, suggesting the same for the gathering itself. Everything here feels like it could unfold and disappear at any moment, leaving only the memory of a shared, fleeting warmth. The television, then, becomes a kind of anchor, a false steady point, offering another kind of world, another kind of fight, to hold onto. A study in Strained camaraderie and Unacknowledged tension held in the same frame. In dialogue with A late 1990s school yearbook portrait page aesthetic, with its flat lighting and forced smiles..