Object



My practice operates through the objects and icons we choose and the language we use to articulate their significance to us. I center research and writing as forms of cultural investigation, focusing on examining the relationship between material culture and meaning-making. 


I hold particular attention to how contemporary desire crystallizes around specific objects, aesthetics, and vocabularies.


How is it that some cultural moments materialize into objects that suddenly seem essential? My approach to research grows from questions surrounding historical positioning. How do we inherit cultural forms? How do we adapt them to current contexts? How do we create bridges between what was and what might be?


And maybe adaptation happens most powerfully when we stop trying to preserve the "original" meaning, preferring to opt-into what new work the form can do. When Sofia Coppola places teens in pastel against the backdrop of suburbia, she is not creating a period piece. Instead, she is employing the visual language of a particular feminine melancholy, examining contemporary experiences of constraint and isolation. This adaptation succeeds by preserving the emotional essence of a visual grammar, permitting release from a literal fidelity to content.


This raises uncomfortable questions about power and access. Who gets to adapt? Who gets to decide which aspects of a cultural form are "essential" versus disposable? When luxury fashion houses inspired by streetwear or when museums acquire Indigenous works of art, are we witnessing creative adaptation or cultural extraction? It more and more feels as though he bridge between past and future is becoming a one-way street, and if we are not careful abotu who is driving, who knows where we will go. 


How do we create bridges between what was and what might be? I am inspired by Walter Benjamin and what he calls “constellations,” allowing past and present to illuminate each other without collapsing the distance between them. 


In my opinion, some of the most interesting contemporary artists seem to work this way. There is Kara Walker’s  silhouettes. Viewers do not safely observe antebellum vioelnce from an enlightened present. Instead, Walker introduces a collision between the then and now. We are complicit in both the looking and the violence. 


I am drawn to moments where theoretical inquiry meets  material culture. The investigation moves between fashion theory and consumer psychology, art criticism, and contemporary persuasions. I appraoch my writing as different research methodologies, ways of thinking through cultural phenomena rather than just documenting them.

tldr: My work gives sustained attention to how culture produces itself through valued moments and objects and how those objects might generate new forms of cultural meaning.



— Jasmine Reiko