wax me to the vapour and the dusk, sometimes
With the almost familiarity of its sly reference to Wall Whitman's 'Song of Myself' , its almost melancholy suggestiveness, its modifying 'sometimes', the title of Mira Gojak's sculpture is as elusive and intriguing as the thing itself. The title's perfection as an entry point to the work lies in the fact that it never quite offers one, signalling instead the purposeful arrest of any singular trajectory of reading. Wax me to the vapour and the dusk, sometimes requisitions the familiar, the note of recognition, as a vehicle for transformation: switching the height of the ordinary, setting it afloat, pushing it to the point of mutation.
The generic plastic garden furniture used as a primary element of the piece could not be more commonplace; it is a model that must inhabitant thousands if not millions of suburban gardens the world over. But here the tables and chairs designed to keep us off the grass, to facilitate conversation, to play host to family dinners, have been cut to pieces, stripped of their primary function, rebuilt, dipped in wax. The viewer, who would, in a different realm, have had command of these objects and would have known exactly what to do with them, is now forced to negotiate a new relationship with them. The question is, what is it, exactly, that they have become? The exact nature of this transformation is elided as quickly as it is alluded to. Dismembered and reconfigured these ObJects have become uncannily organic, but retaining somehow both the conviviality of e ongin and the distress of their transformation.
A cluster of chair backs, suspended just at the height necessary o be vaguely physically threatening, is at moments reminiscent