pear ware
“I Love You, I Think”
July 14 - September 4, 2022 (open 12 to 6pm weekends and by appointment to herculesartstudio@gmail.com )
Opening Reception: Thursday, July 14th, 6 to 9pm*
Public Reading: Thursday, August 4, 7pm*
*masks required
When telling a lie, people that try to withdraw or hide their feelings become less extroverted at that moment because they don’t want others to know. This hidden agenda causes the writer to write with a slightly left leaning slant, regardless if this writer is right or left handed. The sudden changes of the slant for the pronoun “I” are obvious give away signs.
Pear Ware began in 2018 as a transdisciplinary crafts collective comprised of artists Mika Agari, Joan Oh and Carol Hu for the purpose of exploring sustainable wearables, skill swap, make and repair things, and as an excuse to hang out.
We lost Joan in 2021 and have been struggling with what that means and looks and feels like. This exhibition is a part of that process, and includes things that Joan made, both incomplete and complete, things we’ve made together, and things we’ve made since then. Through much conversation and collaboration with friends Paula Cooke, Sunny Lee and Diana Sofia Lozano, this space becomes possible.
The brain becomes conflicted between two sources of information. Our cognitive load is increased and our brains have to work harder to resolve the required differences.
A collection of fragments, ephemera. An archive. A transmission of grief and love.
In the year before Joan’s passing, she was working on, as described by her collaborator Sunny Lee, “a hybrid fictionalized account that includes extraliterary forms such as photography, found images, along with the Stroop test and handwriting analyses to question the dynamics of self that are revealed and/or hidden in relation to others.” Images and text from the book are woven throughout the exhibition.
“...between ‘I love you’ and ‘I love you too,’ the absent presence of desire comes alive. But the boundaries of time and glance and I love you are only aftershocks of the main, inevitable boundary that creates Eros: the boundary of flesh and self between you and me. And it is only, suddenly, at the moment when I would dissolve that boundary, I realize I never can.” - Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet.
Note: All words in Italics are from Joan’s book Semantic Folly
