Shana Kaplow — Essay text

“Windows above a Luncheonette”

An essay by Veronica Kavass for the book, Object Objects : Shana Kaplow

The chair stands in for the body. An oversized dining table balances on two of its four legs. The carpet is actually a painting. There is a habit of stacking plastic chairs on top of one another in her studio and—before they topple over—creating paintings based on the negative space between them. The chair tower is memorialized as a drawing (a nod to Brancusi). The studio is abandoned to see how similar chairs and objects are arranged for the sake of alluring consumers. The store or stage waits for the camera which comes and goes. The photograph becomes a drawing on a page, the page turns into a sculpture, the sculpture into air. The most friction may be found in the seams between images, an interstitial rustling into the unseen origins of her subjects. Or maybe these spaces are only voids. This is what the artist investigates and illuminates: an object can be both material and immaterial.

In her essay, “every exit is an entrance,” Anne Carson describes a childhood dream where she enters her brightly lit living room in the middle of the night to find it looking like its usual self, but also wildly different—as though she caught “the living room sleeping.” What makes a room awake or asleep? What makes a living room alive or dead? The furniture and objects become associated with the beings—a disappointed parent, a purring cat, a natural storyteller — who use them the most. Like language, rooms are arranged to cater to certain expectations. Like sentences, the room’s objects contain a particular subtext. Later in life, Carson compares the dream and room to her father’s face when he’s suffering from dementia—a familiar face that is no longer recognizable. It is a peculiar moment when sturdiness and loose ends seem to be in conversation with one another, speaking a language that we vaguely understand. Like Carson, I see “the entrance into the strangeness so supremely consoling” as though the silent buzzing of objects makes sense out of everything that is difficult—maybe even painful—to grasp. Shana Kaplow’s ink drawings, videos, and sculptures present a similar feeling—like entering through some sort of looking glass. Recognizable domestic objects and structures appear to be their standard, mass-produced selves—but more fragile, as though they’ve developed some sort of self-awareness. But why do I attribute a quality of self-consciousness? Why do they appear vulnerable? Is this notion inspired by the absence of the actual human figure in her work that is especially noticeable because her subjects are objects of human labor?

Perhaps the object has its own trajectory, picking up pieces of all of us along the way. Like the video game, Katamari Damacy, where an adhesive ball rolls around the planet—collecting objects, creatures, and landforms—along the way, to mold a new star for the purpose of repopulating the star-less universe. What if we could see evidence of everything an object contacted when it was assembled, sold, shipped, owned, disowned, maintained, destroyed, or abandoned? What if we could glean its experience the way humans do with one another? In her book The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Sara Ahmed says: "Each of us, in being shaped by others, carries with us ‘impressions’ of those others. Such impressions are certainly memories of this or that other, to which we return in the sticky metonymy of our thoughts and dreams, and through prompting either by conversations with others or through the visual form of photographs.”[1]

[1] Sara Ahmed. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. P. 160

One of Kaplow’s memories of sensing the unseen takes place at MIT’s Hayden Gallery at the age of nine. There, a group of Lynda Benglis' poured sculptures feel like living things. They are still, yet about motion. The sculptures, grouped under the title Totem, are “frozen gestures” and “three-dimensional brushstrokes” that give rise to the realization that an artwork embodies contradictory things at once. The child perceives form as an illusion or, better yet, a chimera that opens doors to an elevated relationship with understanding the multiple ways something is seen—that there is not a single read. This marks the moment she understands the pursuit of both her mother, an abstract painter, and her father, an MIT professor of material science and physics. He delves into the invisible while she turns her sensual observations into physical forms. Kaplow begins her exploration into states of matter—the solid and the dissolving, the physical and the ephemeral, the body and the life of the psyche.

Artists slow life down, experiment with various lenses, freeze a moment, replay it, and, then, show it back to the world. The viewer sees one work can be two, three, fifty things at once, that it is about them and not them, that it is still and moving. But many people bypass this power of perception and fly through their tasks without a second thought. Satisfied within solipsism—restless, rushing, and fatigued. Sara Ahmed refers to this—“The natural attitude does not ‘see the world,’ as it takes for granted what appears; what appears quickly disappears under the blanket of the familiar.”[1] Hence explaining the historical shift from one-of-a-kindness to all-of-a-kindness. Unvarying surfaces work hard to hide untold stories.

[1] Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientation, Objects, Others. London and Durham: Duke University Press, 33.

While riding in the car with her father in Newton, Massachusetts, Shana sees two windows, framed by ruffled curtains, directly above a hardware store. After she announces Look! Someone lives above the shop, her father looks at her with surprise. In his (second-generation) effort to provide her with a good life, she’s been cordoned off from the rest of the world. He tells her that when he was her age, he lived above a luncheonette. The father and daughter do not share in this moment of wonder because what is so new for one is deeply familiar to the other — a divide made apparent. On the other hand, this is a moment of discovery for both of them.

There’s a useless chair in my home. It falls apart when picked up and is unreliable to sit on. I keep it because it has had a long life. One hundred years ago, a traveling life insurance salesmen carried the fold up chair like a suitcase from door to door. When people answered, and were willing to listen, he unfolded the chair, sat down and offered his spiel. The chair’s history is apparent in the design (light, foldable, portable) and the amount of use (the wood is worn in the seat from all his thigh sweat). The manufacturer’s name is sealed on the bottom of the seat (no longer in business). Palpable evidence of the chair’s birth, life, and, now, retirement. I bought the chair from a vintage furniture store in Muscle Shoals to mark the occasion of my thirtieth birthday. The shop owner told me its story while pointing at the sweat marks with his index finger.

I’m looking for a teenage girl in a book called Factory Girls. I think she’s in Dongguan, “a place without memory,”[1] where most of the world’s sneakers are manufactured. Shana told me about a factory girl who wrote her name on a piece of paper and slipped it into the pocket of a pair of jeans on the assembly line. In researching this, I learn hundreds, maybe thousands, of factory workers have done this. As an isolated event, I’m touched. When it is a recurring, collective impulse, I hear wailing.

[1] Chang, Leslie. Factory Girls. p. 28

During Kaplow’s artist residency in Beijing in 2010, she stayed in the neighborhood of Feijiacun near Beijing's fifth ring road. Instead of making art in her studio, she wandered her temporary home in awe of the ways it was different and similar to her own world in Saint Paul. One major difference was that everyone who lived in Feijiacun knew the area would be wiped out soon. First, the water would be shut off and, then they would have to pack up and go. A girl named Weiping, who worked in a five-story shopping center in the Beijing city center, introduced herself to Shana while getting off the same bus. Weiping wanted to practice English and never came across English speakers in Feijiacun. They kept turning the same corners and crossing the same streets as they talked, until they realized they lived only a few blocks away from one another. When it was time to part ways, Weiping asked, “Can I come home with you?” Kaplow didn’t hesitate to welcome her into the studio apartment. They both had an eager curiosity to see into one another’s lives. She visited Weiping and her family in their dormitory building where they offered her tangerines and tea. With her consent, Shana filmed Weiping walking home from the bus stop. She told Weiping to pretend she wasn’t there, but she kept turning around to see if Shana was still there. They had no way to stay in touch when Kaplow left because Weiping didn’t have an email address. Their friendship is a memory of a time when two strangers wanted to follow one another home just to see each other a little closer. Today, Feijiacun is a construction site that looks like a swathe of shadowy burnt trees on Google map images.

When a creative writing class is asked to describe a knock-off modernist chair in the middle of the room, they jot down sturdy, affordable, contemporary, cheap, likable. When asked to try describing it again, they come up with empty, lonely, unwanted, forgotten, sad. One young writer says reminds me of when my mom was sick with cancer. And then others start projecting memories onto the plastic chair. The object becomes a representation of mourning, heartbreak, opportunity, depression, communication, illness, success, revelation. One person asks if he can sit in the chair. Some eyes go wide. Is the chair alive in some way? Or sacred?

Despite all the signifiers that pronounce separation as a constant state, the artist bypasses them and waits for a structure to topple. She’s transfixed by the hovering point, a tower on the verge, just before gravity has its way. There is a single sheet of paper with words that describe the artwork’s intention and purpose. All the words are crossed out except collapsible podiums and found words are my subjects and my materials in this new body of work. Then, a drawing of a silhouetted object precariously placed on the edge of a table turned on its side…

In Kaplow’s exhibition “Near and Far,” there’s an appearance of reversed gravity. A frozen inhalation holds her “particulates” and art objects in suspension, revealing the interstices between them. The space between artist and audience mirrors the tension between producer and consumer – bound together but at a distance. Kaplow’s body of work traces and, therefore, acknowledges the interconnectedness of every thing and being. Her art provides notes on how to identify connectedness in the face of destructive tendencies.