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Weight: Eternal Return

 

Weight: Eternal Return plays with temporal delays and infinite repeats.  The German phrase “einmal ist keinmal”, has been hand-printed several hundred times, screenprinted onto paper and formed into multiples.  The words are an adage, roughly translated as "once is nothing”, taken from a line in Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being. In this, Kundera takes the phrase to mean that “if something happens only once, it may as well not have happened at all”.  
 
Formed into barnacles, the work plays with the association of ‘weight’ with meaning.  This installation was originally produced in 2011 as part of a body of work that examined mimicry and language through the lens of evolutionary theory and the writing and research of Charles Darwin.  Charles Darwin spent 8 years studying barnacles and published 4 volumes on the subject before he published On the Origin of Species (1859).  Although Darwin was concurrently writing On The Origin of the Species, the famous manuscript sat unpublished in his desk drawer while he strove to complete his definitive study of ‘cirripedia’.  In many ways, barnacles were Darwin’s weight and procrastination, but also where he found meaning in his work.

Weight (Eternal Return)

silkscreen on washi, acrylic medium, magnets,

dimensions variable

2011

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