Timewasters™

<p>…My work largely situates itself in relation to the politics of production and reproduction. Where this interest comes from revolves around my participation in studying and making ikebana. I gravitate towards ikebana as it is an artistic pursuit that inherently takes into account the situation in which it is created and presented in. This type of material and situation specificity and self-awareness intrigues me, especially as what is produced passes naturally and is of an inherently fleeting nature.</p> <p>Arguably, this notion gets thrown into question when one considers avant-garde and contemporary ikebana practices, that reduce ikebana to a set of rules or considerations. In this contemporaneous situation, I think of clothing and its arrangement on the body as the closest analog to the practice of making ikebana. Clothing has been used historically in avant-garde ikebana arrangements, dating back to the 1970s when Kosen Ohtsubo himself would either make clothing out of floral material, or use clothing made of plants, such as cotton, as a material to be arranged.</p> <p>While individual garments, that could be likened to a single flower, are a harder case to argue for being a type of contemporary ikebana work, outfits have a much stronger case in their consideration for relative components and situation that take into account season, site, emotion, occasion, among other variables. Like ikebana, outfits are site specific, in that they are geographically present only on the body they contain. They can be documented, but in doing so there is a dangerous approximation and freezing of an image that flattens and squashes the life out of both the outfit and ikebana arrangement…</p>