#487 Containers

The top edge of the panel has holes to hold four roses. Small water containers are included that can be attached to the flowers (not included) on the back. When the work is exhibited, the roses can be left to dry, or they can be watered and replaced as desired.

See the production video here.

Art is a container. Reality is the content.

To experience the world around us, we must understand it to a certain degree. We need to fit what we see into categories. A kind of linguistic container. Seeing and experiencing is a linguistic process. But language does not exist in itself. It exists only in the structure organising our sensations, or the form we give reality when speaking, writing or making images. Neither structure nor language exists without something physical and material. It is in this paradox that we find ourselves. Inside the container of language - which consists of nothing but its content.

The series features works with an appendix placed on top of the work or close to it. This object is exterior to the image plane, the illusionary "window" in the picture, but is still an intrinsic part of the whole. It connects or makes visible the two dimensions of an artwork - its inner logic and its relation to its surrounding.
The title references the famous Coca-Cola campaign and Immanuel Kant's notion of the thing in itself. It means that subjects can only experience the phenomena as they present themselves through perception. It is always fundamentally different from what the things are outside language boundaries - in themselves.

Res Ipsa is a compilation of works made by an act shaping the filler once it is prepared inside the frame. The works thus function as a recording device and give a statement of the event taking place while the filler was still wet.

Res Ipsa is Latin for "the thing itself" and is part of the juridical term "Res ipsa loquitur" (the thing speaks for itself), used when an injury or accident in itself clearly shows who is responsible, such as an instrument left inside a body after surgery.