Teuila Va'aelua
For the Time Being
An observation of the things we preserve, the people we make sacred, and the uneasy authority of remembering someone who can no longer contradict us.
I think of you fondly; I grieve you incorrectly.
Grief is often understood as an involuntary response to loss, yet mourning involves choices about what we remember, preserve, and eventually allow ourselves to forget. In death, a person becomes increasingly dependent upon the living to sustain their memory. We arrange what remains, reconcile contradictions, and elevate the deceased into someone who can no longer challenge the versions of themselves we construct.
For the Time Being draws on the visual language of altars, votives, and religious objects to consider the uneasy relationship between devotion, remembrance, and possession. Through abstracted sculptural forms, elevation and proximity establish an unequal relationship between the remembered and the remembering. The work gives absence a material presence without attempting to resolve it.
What begins as an act of love may become an obligation, where continued suffering is mistaken for faithfulness. The icon, a placeholder, cannot receive, refuse, or correct this offering, yet a relationship persists as though it could. In sustaining their presence, we risk mistaking what we have made of them for who they were.
Can I remember you without making you mine?
