ACCUMULATION
Accumulation is a project that transformed the packaging of consumable products I purchased during a twelve-month period, ending June 25, 2006, into pinhole cameras, which were then used to photograph the packaging’s original content. Both the image of the object and the pinhole camera (once the object’s container) are presented together as a single work of art.
For example I tape and jerry-build a Vitamin Shoppe pill bottle into a camera, and then photograph the Glucosamine & Chondroitin, which were packaged in the bottle, before taking the pills for my knee joint pain. The consumable good, as well as it’s packaging, begins a new, dual existence as aesthetic product as well as the means by which the product is aestheticized. The aim is to reconsider and recontextualize these mass-produced items as 1) artifact and 2) a record—a memoir so to speak—of the most private albeit prosaic elements of my life.
Accumulation consists of 119 diptychs, each coupling a container-camera and a photographic portrait of its former contents. The resulting visual is a meditation on the irony of the mass produced consumer object and the desire for unique aesthetic and individualized expression.
