Zoe Kobovich-Shaw

You cannot experience the world the same way I do. Every moment, object, space, or person I encounter is digested differently by me than it may be by you. Pondering this idea, my practice has become increasingly concerned with the ways and means by which objects are encountered. Moving between an analysis of dreams—a type of external reality, to an analysis of our reality—and the objects and spaces we confront, my practice proposes artworks that might operate without the boundaries between realities, thoughts and space.

As a gesture towards isolating such objects from human experience, my artworks have been installed in my backroom. Recently I’ve taken a liking to liminal spaces and backrooms, places that are very much real yet feel off because they lack a human presence.

My current artworks have become a recreation of such; this artwork explores the ‘chair’.

Here I've taken a very hands-on approach by making such chairs from paper mache, which in turn will make them completely unusable due to their materiality. This simple and almost childish craft material allows me to construct objects with fluidity. It is a light way of working that pulls form straight from my own imagination. These objects enact the idea of a chair and present themselves as skeletons of what they almost could be, denying them of their original purpose to serve humans existence.