Signified: Immaterial Content

Found Object Gallery | Old as Adam

“Signified: Immaterial Content” is a collection of objects inspired by a set of inscrutable homemade flashcards.

Consisting of imagery cut from late-nineteenth century catalogs and magazines, each flashcard is a rebus — a puzzle of pictures and letters signifying a word or phrase — with a specific answer now lost to time.  

As a signifier with an irretrievable signified, each unanswerable flashcard still demands a response, and either elicits our grasping subjective projections, or better still, holds us in a suspended state of unknowing.

All of the objects in this collection examine these links between signifiers — e.g. words, symbols, representations, definitions — and signifieds — e.g. ideals, actions, identities, desires. Whether broken or reinforced, these links are revealed as tenuous and arbitrary in things displaced and defamiliarized over the passage of time.

Like the enigmatic flashcards, the objects of “Signified: Immaterial Content” cleave objective meaning to demand the unknowable and unanswerable.

Signified: Immaterial Content
Spring 2022
Found Object Gallery
Old as Adam Antiques & Americana
125 Benefit Street
Providence, RI