scrying (a proustian photograph) | 2024 | sculpture
Scrying (A Proustian Photograph) is a wall-mounted sculpture that pays homage to Marcel Proust’s ruminations on memory and childhood, his famous remembrance of consuming a madeleine as a child in In Search of Lost Time in particular. In that passage, the protagonist’s consumption of a madeleine conjures a series of memories from childhood at his Aunt Léonie’s house that becomes a reflection on “the vast structure of recollection.” In the process of developing this exhibition Beck discovered a photograph of the interior of The House of Aunt Léonie-Musée Marcel Proust in Illiers-Combray with a striking formation of plates mounted to the wall. Imagining that Proust might have sat in front of this array of plates as a child while consuming madeleines, Beck collected an identical number of vintage souvenir plates from places he has lived over the course of his life; these plates were painted with a chrome finish that obscures if not completely eliminates their underlying imagery, turning them into an array of scrying mirrors in the exact same formation as the plates in Léonie’s house in Illiers-Combray. Simultaneously a self-portrait, a work of quasi-minimalist sculpture, and an inversion of the lenses present in the related photographs, this work embodies Proust’s speculation that “[t]he past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) which we do not suspect. And as for that object, it depends on chance whether we come upon it or not before we ourselves must die.”
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