Local Objects

International Objects is a platform dedicated to a central proposition: to diminish the categories that have kept art and design separate. Objects are never passive, even if that is how we treat them. Whether utilitarian or static, natural or artificial, material or immaterial, animate or inanimate; objects act and are acted upon in relation to their landscape, material, and mode of production. The human relationship to objects is complicated by a value system that exists outside of the object itself. Objects produced en masse can be experienced as unique; objects produced locally are overwhelmed by objects produced from a great distance. Muddled by mechanisms of control and desire, objects are set into motion on wheels of commerce and are consumed by the social organizations that represent them. This misrepresentation often obscures the object’s origin or reproduction to instead highlight a mythological value. Detached from its ethos, the object is transformed into a sign. Artists and designers of all disciplines, through observation and method, manipulate these taxonomies. Objects can be deconstructed, transformed and recombined to create objects anew. Artists and designers labor to sustain an active engagement with their subjects. With an understanding of the ontological confusion between objects and the sign systems that mask them, artists and designers work to destabilize and exploit the mediating functions that govern all things.