With Conversation 17, Corinne de San Jose methodically wraps everyday objects with fabric, neither to obscure nor hide, but to transform the materiality of her subjects— hammer, vase, wine bottle—into objets d’art.

Like her previous exhibit titles, Conversation 17, is a song reference, a play on the title of a song by The National. She connects the song to the idea of suffering from oblivion, or losing identity, grasping to control how your surroundings affect you.

The subjects are all concealed, completely wrapped, but there is no doubt as to what they are. By wrapping, their essential form is revealed rather than concealed. She has picked the most mundane of objects, binds it so that we will never know of its make or type. The selection is deliberate; we easily associate these objects with gender—from the sharp phallic tools to the curvy and round vessels. In the final process, the only visible layer is what we would easily associate with the feminine—floral fabric set against another floral fabric. Layer upon layer, the juxtaposition is at once jarring and beautiful.

But it’s the patterns of fabric that have a mesmeric effect, like staring into a stereogram. We are drawn in to look a few seconds longer than we originally intended, the clashing prints a visual, tactile overload, a still life that demands more of your time. To wrap something is also to protect it, and the impulse to protect, to heighten that which is basic or essential is perhaps the strongest conceptual link to Corinne’s past works. 

Words by Monster Jimenez and Mario Cornejo 

It is easy to dismiss the relevance of still life photography. History keeps pointing us towards its decorative nature. But like Vanitas, Memento Moris, and the funereal art of the past, it seems to have acquired values to reflect on. They speak of objects that seem meaningless, yet participate in this reflection.

Picking up certain stereotypes of the genre, and adding a rather meticulous and meditative process of wrapping objects in fabric, I hope to create a sort of visual conversation that reflects on ideas that seem to repeatedly occur in my work; questions on feminine identity, the precarious relationship between subject and background, blurring the lines between drawing and photography, and the eternal debate on what is art and what is decoration.

- Corinne de San Jose
Conversation 17
January 2013