Ex2 Curatorial Text

Elizabeth Gross re-interprets and elevates traditional crafts and found objects through the use of a deceptively simple narrative in order to pose us a question masquerading as a statement. Gross asks us to consider the implications of allowing multiple, often contradictory truths to be held together in the same thought.

Moving in the realms of paradoxical uncertainty created by the action of another person on a third party, Gross faces the contradictions and unknowing that underpin our interactions. Is this to be viewed negatively or should we in fact welcome the possibilities it brings and embrace a Keatsian mode of negative capability - an antidote to narrow and ultimately futile truth quests and grasping for over-simplifying explanatory frameworks? The tension at the heart of the work lies in the conflict between the potentially emancipating effects of this Hyper-Janusianism and the possibility that this could in fact be a new trap, further removed from reality and more difficult to escape from.

The centrality of language to our contemporary concepts of truth, through the pragmatic acceptance or rejection of language games and their rules, necessitates that we can identify speakers, addressees and the things which are spoken about. We should also be able to differentiate between the types of statements that are made: those that merely describe a particular circumstance; those that create a situation through their own performative value; and those which are in fact commands or instructions.

Gross toys with these theoretical notions, obfuscating the speaker and addressee, mirroring our lived experience where none of these elements come with identifying labels or tags. If we are unable to determine how and when we are being commanded or when we are enacting change through our speech, then how can we be sure of our own agency? Letting everything be true at once has implications for our integrity as the authors of our own destiny or at least our self-image as such.

This brings to mind wider questions about the limiting and yet simultaneously liberating qualities of rules, habits, conventions and manners. Are these constraints to be viewed as oppressive, conservative devices which, while allowing us to interact, ultimately limit the field and veracity of our mutually lived experiences? Or, are these rather to be seen as enabling mechanisms, tools which allow the rational, sensitive individual to act and interact from a base of certainty which opens up the possibility of transcendence?

Living in a society aware of its own postmodernity, which in its rejection of many of the old, top-down metanarratives and grand truths embraced a more relative and fragmentary approach, in many senses we already allow everything to be true at once. However, if we let everything be true at once, does this open the door to apathy and ennui, elicting a collective throwing up of hands? Is this in fact the end of the search for truth, the search for each other, for ourselves?



Would you be happier if you let everything be true at once?