When things go missing, we believe we can’t see them. We perceive absence as lack. We go searching in familiar corners of rooms and worn out stretches of memory. We alert loved ones, we launch search parties, we plan to be better at not forgetting. Yet where are these items during our fretful searches? Could it be that any object or person or feeling is never more present than during agonizing moments of absence? With careful concentration and renewed awareness can we actually translate absence into presence?
The imagery in Joel Whitaker’s exhibition When Things Go Missing (WTGM) suggests that such translation may be possible. He transports the viewer beyond stories and facts reliant on presence. He invites us to places that favor the poetic over the literal, yet also depict the literal and physical spaces that linger beyond, behind and around the poetic. His works are a gentle command to look, an urgent reminder to see the tenuous boundaries among space (territories others delineate), place (locations we inhabit, love, manipulate or overlook) and objects both lost and found (after all, “matter is neither created nor destroyed,” right?).
When things go missing, we believe we can’t see them. We perceive absence as lack. We go searching in familiar corners of rooms and worn out stretches of memory. We alert loved ones, we launch search parties, we plan to be better at not forgetting. Yet where are these items during our fretful searches? Could it be that any object or person or feeling is never more present than during agonizing moments of absence? With careful concentration and renewed awareness can we actually translate absence into presence?
The imagery in Joel Whitaker’s exhibition When Things Go Missing (WTGM) suggests that such translation may be possible. He transports the viewer beyond stories and facts reliant on presence. He invites us to places that favor the poetic over the literal, yet also depict the literal and physical spaces that linger beyond, behind and around the poetic. His works are a gentle command to look, an urgent reminder to see the tenuous boundaries among space (territories others delineate), place (locations we inhabit, love, manipulate or overlook) and objects both lost and found (after all, “matter is neither created nor destroyed,” right?).