Commonwealth and Council

Change, Repeat

Susan Choi

Images

Commonwealth & Council presents works on paper that procession the permutations of originals into veritable copies. 


Composited from personal and collective picture library, Susan Choi draws a lone, gendered figure against a landscape complete with teleported flora and fauna from space-time continuum. With each drawing, Choi delves into a process of alteration by hand tracing a variable copy and making subsequent variables thereafter through hand and mechanical reproduction. These photocopies are then further differentiated through drawing, painting, and collaging on their surfaces. With this proliferation of veritable copies, the authenticity of the original becomes obsolete. Choi authors a diegesis of alterity by obfuscating the original through differentiation of otherness: “Every experience is a new experience, not a repetition of a past experience. Although it may appear similar, it is not identical. It is not possible to have a uniform or a constant experience. Things are consistently changing, affected purely by the separateness of it and altered by new information, ideation, and circumstance both internal and external. Duplicates do not exist, only variables.” “Reality is created by the person, who is the authority of their own life, their own reality, yet everything exists in representation of, not what it actually is. It is perceived and filtered through something or someone else, filtered again through their subjective filter, a subjective reflection of another and so on. These drawings represent the flux of reiteration and obliteration of the ‘original.’”