CASA/remembering

A scrap piece of wood.
A rabbit (or hare?) covered in Wax
A scrap piece of metal.
An orange line.
A tooth.
A cardboard house.
A worn out photograph.
This aspects make up the piece here pictured, CASA/remembering. They make up the material/physical realm of this piece. That would be the most basic and straightforward explanation for it.
Now, lets get into concepts.
All of these materials were collected randomly. From boxes I have kept full of things around my room, or things that were lying around my studios. At first they were just that, random objects, but after sitting with them, a piece of paper, a pen, and (maybe?) a little rum, they became something else.
These objects are mine, I have kept them, I have collected them, and for some odd reason I did not just throw them away. They become a part of me; they represent and portray me, Esteban M. Pilonieta Vera.
The way they where arranged is meant to show something very specific (I guess the rum helped). All the objects lay on the legged scrap piece of wood because I present this to you as a theatrical moment, a snap shot of some kind, so it serves as the pedestal for it.
Weirdly enough, the rabbit has always been my favorite animal. This small toy was particularly abducted from a museum against its will, a sticker with a price directed a different ritual to take place, but my pocket found a way around it; in order to keep my kleptomaniac obsessions alive. So, my favorite animal, my little problem as a kleptomaniac, and a glob of wax. Wax? Yeah, wax. This I interpret to be like the cloud of things, the weight of the common day life that slows me down, that keeps me contrived here, in Delaware.
The tooth is the real me, or at least what at some point I really wanted to go back to being, but then I realized I am good enough as I am. It did at some point form ‘‘me,’’ since it is a molar tooth that was removed from my denture a couple of years back.
The cardboard house in which it stands in front of is CASA = home, Venezuela, Mérida, El Valle.
The orange line serves as a connecting passage between the ‘‘present me’’, and what I once considered to be the ‘‘real me.’’ It is the voyage I have to take with certain regularity so I do not drive myself insane, because I miss too much.
That is the worn out photograph, the worn out memories. At some point it portrayed my best friend, and it was in my wallet, next to other objects (like labels or tickets) that served as a quick escape (a quick fix) back home. Until it was so worn out that her face was entirely removed from the image and transferred onto my wallet’s plastic pocket. The sub-title remembering comes from these ideas, since the ‘‘present me’’ stands in front of the ‘‘real me,’’ reviving old memories.
These piece is part of a show, the Miniature / Micro-Monumental, in the Townsend University as of now, and until the beginning of November. After that they will come back to the University of Delaware together with other student’s work from Townsend and displayed here. Hopefully the show will make their way to Asia afterwards, to both Thailand and Japan.