POLITE REMNANTS (Laissez Unfaire/Lascia Fare), 2011-2014, photography, 77 x 115 cm (30 x 45 in), archival ink on epson matte paper. Formed by gathering the remnants of human textiles & machine labor, formal studio-lit portraits of machined-washed residual become friendly posed objects. The remains were formed of lint caught in drying machine sieves, found in homes and laundromats in various parts of the world. The first impulse to make the series was an interest in dust, magnetics, and accumulation. I wondered, could understanding a system come about through studying a byproduct of that system? Invisible, often actually means marginalised, discarded, or internalised and ignored: when there is actually some material fact, ideological assumption or logic to be examined. By looking at these discarded objects in an archive, Polite Remnants asks viewers to consider systemic changes in the way matters are handled. Laisséz-faire systems, government remains out of business dealings. In a Laisséz-unfaire system, there are systems created for gathering remnants, and possibly entire systems created to manufacture remains. In Italian, Lascia Fare takes on a different meaning and action: Let It Be. In the dialectic and semiotic investigations, Polite Remnants (Laisséz-Unfaire/Lascia Fare), makes visible nascent knowledge embedded in the everyday life of machine and human labor. Perhaps in looking at portraits of byproducts, the machinations around the ideas of progress are revealed to evaluate their qualities. These are but a sample of the images, there are 46 lint portraits in this work.
