JT: These headlamps served out their purpose as functional parts of a vehicle to illuminate the driving path, and perhaps more significantly as a symbol of power and prestige the automobile represents. Now old and and defunct, their reality enters another phase as they are exposed to the elements of decay. As the weather continually changes, the decaying process gains momentum, randomly but surely, endowing these abandoned shells with layers of textures and colours that can only be built upon through the passage of time. Rot, rust, mold, peels and all, this is precious and unique for there is none that is the same and no an other.

 

AJ: The opulent automobiles of the 1930s were symbols of pride and prosperity for the privileged and elite. The headlamps positioned forward is the extension of the steering, illuminating the drive, the driving force towards industrial progress, a projector of purpose and ambition. Intuitively, by taking the shell and literally turning on its ear to face down, it elicits a totally different reading. Now it becomes a transmitter of energy from the earth. A totem enacting a ritual. Purpose and function dissolving into the auric, enabling receptivity, activating energetic fields. Of the object and yet beyond, transcending its own form, becoming timeless and therefore death proof. From subservience to the industrial to evoking the spiritual, like the philosophers’ stone, turning base metal into gold.

 

JT: The functional object through its death and resurrection attains the poetic.

 

AJ: The notion that we have apporached this in an anthropological process of uncovering a wreck of abandoned shells that once served their function as car headlamps and re-appropriating them to reveal a poetic narrative as totemic objects imbued with new meanings far from its functional origin, but that this perhaps is closer to the origin, the primal.

 

JT: The physical process of uncovering, restoring, preserving, brings out a creative process of probing, wondering, extracting, eventually evolving into a poetic narrative. Sorting out these objects from an annonymous pile of dusty wreck and individualising them, the objects become spell bound with the energies of their history, revealing their own numerous stories.

 

AJ: Personal stories, memories of journeys, peppered with unforgettable encounters and relationships. Collective stories, the psyche of an era, war and progress, un/masking a reality of human dys/functions.

 

JT: By animating them through various arrangments, new narratives emerge through old stories, old stories told through renewed dispositions, different realities collect, time collapses, space expands, we become involved in our own fascination.

 

AJ: We discover the enigma of the ritualistic, re-presenting these objects in an energetic field, these rituals charging the space and somwhere within that space a platform to explore our own dispositions and enact our own preoccupations and concerns. We become scenographers, playing with different devices and apparatus.