Will you miss me when I’m gone?

2016 - Photography (17"x22" and 40"x52". Inkjet prints on paper.) - Adrienne Scott


Adrienne Scott (she/her) is an artist based in Toronto, Ontario. She holds a BFA from the University of Ottawa (2016) and is a recipient of the Edmund and Isobel Ryan Scholarship in photography. She has participated in exhibitions throughout Ontario, including at Idea Exchange (Cambridge, Ontario), and Karsh-Masson Gallery (Ottawa, Ontario). She has also been a collaborator on interdisciplinary projects through programs such as the 2017 Montreal Contemporary Music Lab (LMCML), and recently participated in the 2020 Roundtable Residency as a member of Emergensies collective, a 3-person collective founded to explore the connections between music and animation.


http://www.adriennemscott.com/

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‘Will you miss me when I’m gone?’ 

Text by Jess Tsang



What makes an object valuable?

We cloak our fears and dreams in talismans, tokens, heirlooms. Beloved children’s blankets, lucky socks, jade to ward off evil spirits, your grandmother’s watch, my father’s belt buckle.

Where does the line get drawn between heirloom and hoarder? As humans, we are predisposed to collecting. Our things form our narratives, our senses of self, our histories, and our legacies. Who are we without our clothes, jewels, books, records, tchotchkes? Who might we have been if these objects were different?

And what happens if we construct our own identities by constructing new objects?

Adrienne Scott’s series “Parcels” presents a series of intricate objects alongside a family archive of letters and telegrams from World War I. These objects appear ancient and otherworldly, simultaneously sinuous and metallic. One image is leaf-like, reminiscent of fine Kanazawa gold coating a natural object. Others are beautiful, fungal - like ancient organs frozen in time.

In truth, these objects are forgeries of artifacts, artistic constructs presented alongside family heirlooms. Presented as images, viewers are free to imagine their weight, their delicate yet cemented textures, their unsettling humanity. And the humanity of these objects is striking - their various patinas combined with crisscrossing internal strings indicate that there is more, much more, underneath the surface.

“I am drawn to letters as material ways that people care for each other, even when the context of these tokens are stripped over time. The objects that I made and documented in response twin this gesture of caring, as these objects often began as masses of folded paper that continued to grow and be held together by string as it wrapped around the object, mimicking the act of wrapping and preparing actual parcels to be sent.” Adrienne Scott

Objects, like humans, contain multitudes. I water a clipping of a plant I picked for my grandmother, something she touched, acknowledged, and appreciated in the last, difficult, days of her life. That small stem has grown to form a large root system, a constant reminder that these simple organisms outlived her own complex one.

When we can no longer care for a person we love, we care by memorializing their objects. What is valuable to the antiquer is not necessarily analogous to the individual - but if not for the meticulous record-keepers and cataloguers among us, we would have very few historical objects. Handwritten letters, ornaments created by our ancestors - these artifacts not only connect us to those who came before, but give us a slight sense of who they were.

“NOTHING is to be written on this side except the date and signature of the sender. Sentences not required may be erased. If anything else is added the post card will be destroyed.

...

I am quite well. I have been admitted into hospital

{sick   } and am going on well.
{wounded } and hope to be discharged soon.

I am being sent down to the base.

                          {letter date _____________________

I have received your

 

                                {telegram “ _____________________

                                

                                {parcel “ _____________________

Letter follows at first opportunity

I have received no letter from you

    {lately
    {for a long time”

                                                                              —Postcard text from “Parcels”

What did our ancestors care about, and how much of their internalizations have been handed down to us? In our increasingly digital world, it is almost an act of defiance to put time into the construction of a physical object. To further manipulate these objects digitally obscures the line between the tangible and the virtual. To my eye, the objects of “Parcels” are the size of a computer mouse - handheld, slightly heavy. They could easily be much, much larger or smaller, or I could be looking at something digitally distorted, that does not exist at all. I wonder if someone might find them someday, and trace them back. In our current world of imbalanced abundances, it is interesting to ponder what might be considered historical, valuable, or important 100 years from now. While I cannot claim to understand what the objects that appear in “Parcels” are composed of, I see that meticulous care has been put into both the depiction and creation of each. In this way, the digital images are perhaps more valuable than the objects themselves, creating a conundrum for those who come after us.



                                                      —”Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone”, Carter Family



   
Read Adrienne’s essay on Jess Tsang’s work HERE.