JCNT - May 2025 Release - Full Release - Flipbook - Page 14
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Raphine, Micah Evans, 2015
Exotic encounters
Combining prefabricated objects with their form, medium, and history makes the
known and familiar exotic and handmade. On a 2022 trip to Washington, D.C., I
viewed Micah Evans' (2015) work titled Raphine, a sewing machine made of
"lampworked borosilicate glass" from bongs that address the "... changing
perceptions of tools over time." It is an example of how artists alter the readymade meanings that are naturalized and typical of everyday life. I want to
problematize "form follows function" and engage in new understandings with my
clients. As Hutcheon (1988) writes, "The act of problematizing is, in a way, an act
of restoring relevance to something ignored or taken for granted" (p. 229). If we
presume that form follows function, our imaginations are bound by
representational certainty, whereas the Fountain, Bicycle Wheel, and Evans'
Raphine defy their prior utility. These artworks remind me that psychology's
assessment of dysfunction and function privileges normative standards at the
expense of individual invention or perception.
Narrative practices can encourage alloyed forms of repurposing and retelling.
Deleuze and Guattari describe an orchid and wasp's encounter in A Thousand
Plateaus, where representational identities are blurred, and the orchid and wasp
form an assemblage (von-Douglass-Ittu, 2008). Like Deleuze's orchid and wasp,
artists can create assemblages that hover between each object's original
identities as shared acts of becoming. Their relational interactions let us escape
resemblance altogether and gravitate toward encounters that resist closure. As a
client recently stated, "I want to say how I feel without it having to be one thing
or another." In agreement, I wonder about the boundaries between concepts and
how to embrace a hybrid multiplicity that celebrates what another client calls "inBreaking the Frame: Aesthetic Encounters with Narrative Practices – Part Two
Journal of Contemporary Narrative Therapy, May 2025 Release, p. 5-28.
www.journalnft.com
