A two-poster series asking who decides what counts as art. Drawing on a collection of objects from Mughal India, the Ottoman Empire, West Africa, Japan, and Indonesia, the work questions two assumptions: that ornament is "just decoration," and that objects in Western museums belong where they are. Ornament as Visual Language treats pattern as text. Adinkra symbols, Ottoman tile motifs, and Satsuma porcelain each carry fixed meanings, and the line "This is not decoration. It is language" repeats across the poster in Urdu, Sanskrit, Persian, Turkish, and Greek. One Culture's Art Is Another's Artifact turns to museums, following looted, "dispersed," and unreturned objects, and the way non-Western work gets labeled "craft" instead of art. Each poster is written in two voices: numbered captions record the facts, while handwritten annotations respond to them. The tension between the official record and a personal reaction is the point. The question underneath both posters is simple: if we don't know your name, do we just call your work craft? The series is designed for an international airport, where travelers from many of these cultures pass through on their way somewhere else. Placed between departure gates, the posters meet people at the same border crossing many of these objects once made, and ask them to look twice at what they're about to see in museums abroad.
A two-poster series asking who decides what counts as art. Drawing on a collection of objects from Mughal India, the Ottoman Empire, West Africa, Japan, and Indonesia, the work questions two assumptions: that ornament is "just decoration," and that objects in Western museums belong where they are. Ornament as Visual Language treats pattern as text. Adinkra symbols, Ottoman tile motifs, and Satsuma porcelain each carry fixed meanings, and the line "This is not decoration. It is language" repeats across the poster in Urdu, Sanskrit, Persian, Turkish, and Greek. One Culture's Art Is Another's Artifact turns to museums, following looted, "dispersed," and unreturned objects, and the way non-Western work gets labeled "craft" instead of art. Each poster is written in two voices: numbered captions record the facts, while handwritten annotations respond to them. The tension between the official record and a personal reaction is the point. The question underneath both posters is simple: if we don't know your name, do we just call your work craft? The series is designed for an international airport, where travelers from many of these cultures pass through on their way somewhere else. Placed between departure gates, the posters meet people at the same border crossing many of these objects once made, and ask them to look twice at what they're about to see in museums abroad.
A two-poster series asking who decides what counts as art. Drawing on a collection of objects from Mughal India, the Ottoman Empire, West Africa, Japan, and Indonesia, the work questions two assumptions: that ornament is "just decoration," and that objects in Western museums belong where they are. Ornament as Visual Language treats pattern as text. Adinkra symbols, Ottoman tile motifs, and Satsuma porcelain each carry fixed meanings, and the line "This is not decoration. It is language" repeats across the poster in Urdu, Sanskrit, Persian, Turkish, and Greek. One Culture's Art Is Another's Artifact turns to museums, following looted, "dispersed," and unreturned objects, and the way non-Western work gets labeled "craft" instead of art. Each poster is written in two voices: numbered captions record the facts, while handwritten annotations respond to them. The tension between the official record and a personal reaction is the point. The question underneath both posters is simple: if we don't know your name, do we just call your work craft? The series is designed for an international airport, where travelers from many of these cultures pass through on their way somewhere else. Placed between departure gates, the posters meet people at the same border crossing many of these objects once made, and ask them to look twice at what they're about to see in museums abroad.
