Artist Statement

Within cultural and historical contexts, we use authenticity to lend authority to individual perceptions.  Authenticity, as a label or way of defining the qualities of objects, is often problematic because the value of them revolves around assumptions about the experiences underlying their creation.  By using various methods of production and reproduction that range from traditional handicraft, to industrial reproduction, to digital fabrication, I explore how the multiple or mass-produced object can change our understanding of the “original” and investigate the criteria by which we define its authenticity.  This way of reproducing “authentic” objects raises the issue of imitation, and allows me to re-contextualize them to challenge their cultural and historical meanings.  Using the multiple as a vehicle, I investigate how we experience the original and our invention of the criteria used to define authenticity.  Literally and figuratively, the work creates shadows and reflections that engage the idea of originality.  These objects, themselves, cannot be called authentic, except by the values that we project onto them.  Claiming the object to be authentic only exposes it as a shadow or a reflection of a non-existent “original”.  Just as the moon only casts light reflected from the sun, the moon jar, an iconic pottery form that originated in Korea, yet has permeated the formal vocabulary of pottery from nearly every continent, is only a reflection of culture.  At a point in time where information is endlessly reproduced, and any possibility of the “original” slips farther away, I propose that the only real place that authenticity can exist lies within the experience of the thing.