The Black Box
Cardboard box, 50 reproductions, carbon prints, c-type prints, mat gel transfers, digital prints, original artwork reproductions, found objects, digital frame.
The Black Box is an autobiographical work that draws conceptual and structural inspiration from Marcel Duchamp’s The Green Box. Echoing Duchamp’s interrogation of authorship and artistic intent, The Black Box functions as a condensed archive—a curated miniature of selected past works that I believe most closely realized my original artistic vision.
These scaled reproductions purposefully destabilize the distinction between original and copy, challenging the assumed autonomy and sanctity of the singular art object. By re-presenting these works in a new, diminished form, the piece questions hierarchies of authenticity and originality. For me, each duplication is not a secondary representation but an artwork in its own right—an echo that carries the weight of its own presence.
Furthermore, The Black Box disrupts the viewer’s expectation of total visual access. The individual works within remain obscured, unseen, inviting reflection on the limits of perception and the impossibility of experiencing an artwork in its entirety. In withholding visibility, the piece subverts the notion of the artwork as a wholly graspable entity, instead emphasizing absence, memory, and the unseen as integral components of meaning.