Going through my parents old things, I had found letters with envelopes bearing notes on the outside: do not fold, photos inside. the same message had several versions, but they all had one purpose - to preserve a particular experience that is being transmitted with the use of a photograph.

 

Most of what i saw were travel photos, and some were of people, relatives I had never ever met, or their friends from long ago. what struck me is that act - one which has been replaced by the digital age and the convenience of social media - of a physical photograph, a hard copy, a memento, to transmit via a letter, this experience that otherwise could not be witnessed firsthand.

 

The work consists of ceramic envelopes in various stages of “being opened”, their hard nature a metaphor of letter sending - an act frozen in time, yet at the same time their fragility akin to the fleetness of memory as borne by their contents. 

 

Together with the envelopes are instant photographs taken during the beginning of the pandemic throughout the time that galleries had reopened and physical shows had restarted. they come in different series, combinations of moments and opportunities that access had been denied to a larger populace given health restrictions currently in place.

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The idea of a photograph, whose imagery can be both foreign and surreal - never knowing how it really was being there, what it was really like- sent through letters that might as well have come from a fictional land - as distant as experience can validate - come together as this concrete, corporeal object that is evidence of a reality that is neither here nor there.

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- Koki Lxx

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Do Not Fold

Instax, stoneware, manual, wooden box

10 x 6 x 5 in

2021