11.27.07

Polly
by Christina Muraczewski

Before I leave the house in the morning I go through three sets of four rituals for getting ready to make sure nothing was forgotten.

When I go to the store I plan to buy five things or in groups of five so I remember what I was supposed to get. I organize and categorize by a number of different systems. I make lists of activities and items and place already "checked off" activities or items on the list to get a head start. Never is there room for the diagonal. A rectangle functions better as a square. A crack in a wall must be repaired. The order of natural elements must be left to its integrity. Everything must match.

Minimalism serves as the perfect model for this mindset but lacks the particular. The absurdity becomes lost in the austerity. The complex becomes the simple. By employing minimal characteristics, I create formal and informal relationships that are usually subtly depicted to mimic a kind of ethereal experience desired by the minimalists, one that is disrupted purposefully by a foreign element: humor. Humor in the form of obsessiveness, senselessness, or sarcasm defines the absurd to serve as a balance to the mundane. The attempt is to fashion a new hybrid: minimalism as the backbone and idiosyncrasy as the fuel. This hybrid is meant to sit in the “in-between�?, the balance of abstraction and representation, the literal and the conceptual, sincerity and superficiality.