About the work

The crumpled cigarette butt, so small in the ashtray, is the only object in the frame that truly belongs to *this* moment, this room. Everything else — the leaves, the suits, the dancing, the distant parade float — seems to have arrived from some other time, some other purpose, layered over the parquet like an ill-fitting dream. It's as if a grand, forgotten machine has churned up disparate elements of life and laid them out for inspection, leaving only the stub of a cigarette to mark the passage from one unreality to another. We are not watching a dance here, but an assembly of parts, each trying to find its own gravity. Perhaps this is how we become ourselves: by accumulating the incongruous and calling it a pattern.