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Stick From Nature

Luke Wassink
10"x10"
digital media and photographs
2006

Wassink discusses this series:

My work is designed to explore the nature of representation and it's inherent contradictions. I do this by creating several different representations of a simple object, and placing them in close proximity to the object itself (a stick) allowing the observer to easily contrast the two.

This reveals the innate limitations of representation. A representation of a physical object such as a stick is, at its core, an attempt to capture something useful about an object of infinite and perfect detail using a finite amount of information. The stick is exactly and perfectly itself down to every detail. It would require an infinite amount of description to perfectly capture it. Thus, on the surface, any attempt to represent the stick is seemingly contradictory since no matter how detailed the representation it could never capture even a tiny fraction of the actual stick.

This dilemma is remedied by our previous experience with sticks, and with things in general. Because we have seen many other things our associations and previous knowledge allow the representations in context to take on truly meaningful, infinite and definite significance.

It is not, however, until one has viewed the stick itself that the true importance of its representations can be understood. Even though the stick in itself contains all possible representations of itself, in a fundamental contradiction, many of the representations are, in fact, not present in the stick until you have seen them. The representations can not be truly appreciated till one experiences the stick itself, but that experience does not take on it's full meaning until it is over as its representations, through interpretation and memory, serve to do the impossible—add new meaning to an object which is inherently and perfectly complete.

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